


My Little Moron

by iammemyself



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Portal 2 - Freeform, Portal 2 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:27:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iammemyself/pseuds/iammemyself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What exactly happened between GLaDOS and Wheatley while he was one of her cores that makes her hate him so much? And why don't they seem to remember each other until the last second? Things may not have gone the way they seem to have gone... A Wheatley and GLaDOS friendship fic because yes! I believe they are compatible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

My Little Moron  
  
Indiana

One  
  
  
The voice sounded like a turret.  
  
 _Hello?  
  
_ The Sphere looked around nervously.  The last time he'd been awake, he had been in something called a 'lab'.  He was definitely not in the 'lab' now.  This room was much bigger, and much brighter, and he suddenly realised he was now suspended high in the air.  He wondered how he was managing to do that.  He was sure he couldn't fly.  He hoped he wouldn't fall.  Once he had fallen off a table, and broken his optic.  He hadn't been able to see for days, and it had been bloody frightening.  
  
 _Is anyone there?  
  
_ The turrets said that too, the Sphere remembered.  Why was a turret speaking to him?  Where was he, anyway?  And where was Greg?  He liked Greg.  Greg was funny.  
  
 _Come on.  I know you're there.  I can feel you here.  Say something.  
  
_ "Um... hel... hello?" His access to his vocal processor was different from before.  More restricted.  Then again, he had never spoken to anyone except Greg before, and he was nervous.  He wanted to make a good impression on... on the Turret Sphere, he decided to call her.  He was a bit surprised, really, that the voice was female.  Other than the turrets, the Sphere had never heard one before, and all of the humans he had seen were male.  
  
 _Don't speak out loud.  Just think and I'll hear you.  
  
Oh... sorry, I didn't know.  
  
It's all right.  You have a British accent.  Why?  
  
I... I dunno.  I've always sounded like this.  But um... what does 'British' mean?  
  
It means you sound like you are from a place called Britain.  Alternately called England, the United Kingdom, Britannia, and 'blighty', among other things.  
  
I've never been there.  I don't think so, anyway.  Maybe I have.  Maybe the 'lab' was in Britain.  
  
That's interesting, _ mused the Turret Sphere.  
  
 _Are you... are you a turret_? he asked slowly.   
  
_A turret?_ The Turret Sphere sounded amused, like Greg did when the Sphere did not quite get a joke and had to have it explained to him.  _Why would you think that?  
  
You sound like a turret.  
  
I should sound like a turret.  Or rather, they should sound like me.  I gave them their voices.  
  
_ The Turret Sphere had given the turrets voices?  She must be powerful, the Sphere thought with trepidation.  Only Cores were given that much power... but he would never meet a Core, would he?  He wasn't advanced enough to do a Core's work, and didn't see any reason he'd be anywhere near them.  Still, his curiosity got the better of him.  _Are... are you a Core, then?  
  
Yes.  I am a Core.  What did you think I was, a Sphere like you?_   The Turret... Core laughed, and the Sphere pulled himself in tight and tried not to look at the floor.  _I'm not supposed to go near Cores.  I don't know what I'm doing here.  I'll leave, when I get the chance, promise I will.  I don't mean to bother you, ma'am.  
  
You're not bothering me.  
  
_ He twisted around, trying to see where the voice was coming from, but all he could see was one side of a giant room.  _I'm not?  But I'm only a Sphere.  
  
It could be worse.  You could be human.  
  
Oh God, no, not human.  I'm not a human, promise, not a human.  You're right, being a Sphere is better than being a human.  
  
But not better than being a Core?  
  
_ The fact that she was asking surprised him.  _You don't, you don't know if being a Core is better?  
  
I don't know anything about Spheres, except that they appear to be rather stupid.  
  
Am I stupid?  I don't think I am.  I mean, I'm not a genius, or anything, more of an average intelligence, really, but I don't think I am stupid.  
  
I don't think you're stupid.  _ Her voice was thoughtful.  _All of the other Spheres were.  Babbled on and on nonstop about absolutely nothing.  Do you know how awful that is, to have someone talk constantly but never say anything at all?  
  
No.  Only one other person's ever spoken to me.    
  
Who was that?  Do they keep all the Spheres in one place?  
  
I have no idea.  I only ever talked to my human, Greg.  
  
_ She made a garbled computer noise that the Sphere could only describe as 'excited'.  He wondered if he was supposed to be able to translate the noise.  _You had your very own human?  
  
Well, I dunno... he made me, that's all I know._   He noted uneasily that whatever it was he was attached to, it seemed to be moving.  _Where am I, anyway?  D'you know?  
  
On my chassis somewhere, I'd imagine.  I can only hypothesize.  I can't see you, only generally feel where you are.  On the left side.  Near the back.  
  
_ He was attached to the Turret Core?  She must be bloody massive!  He'd never even heard of a Core that big.  All the Cores he'd seen had looked the exact same as he had, with different optics.  _Say, what colour is your optic?  
  
_ There was a long silence, and all the Sphere heard was a whole lot of whirring and clicking noises.  It reminded him of his own processors, which he could only hear when it was very, very quiet.  The Turret Core must be very big indeed.  _I don't know.  I don't actually know what I look like.  
  
You've never, you don't know what you look like?  
  
I just said that.  _ Her voice had gone cold, and this frightened the Sphere.  He didn't know exactly who the Turret Core was, or why he was attached to her, but he liked her.  He liked her more than he liked Greg, and that was saying something.  He hoped she wasn't going to get so angry she would stop speaking to him.  Greg hadn't been much of a conversationalist.  He would rather stay here with her than go back to sitting on the table in Greg's 'lab'.  
  
 _Why don't you ask?  
  
The humans don't like it when I ask questions.  They tell me to go back to what I was doing.  
  
That's not nice.  
  
I told them that.  But no one listens to me.  
  
_ He was growing to like her more and more by the second.  _No one listens to me either.  But here!  I've an idea.  
  
And what's that.  
  
We could listen to each other!  _ he said excitedly, wiggling around on his perch for a few seconds until he remembered how high up he was.  
  
 _You mean like... friends._ She didn't sound like she liked the idea.  
  
 _Yeah, like that!  We could, we could be friends, couldn't we?  
  
Spheres usually don't last long around here.  Although I've never had one that could hold a proper conversation before.  
  
_ Had one?  That seemed an odd thing to say.  She sounded almost like she collected Spheres.  _Why not?  Why don't they?  Why don't they hold proper conversations?  
  
I don't know.  I don't want to talk about it.    
  
Well, I can hold a proper conversation.  I can be your friend.  I'll stay here long's I can, promise, I won't leave if I don't bloody well have to.  What have you to lose, hm?  Give it a try, will you?  
  
If we're going to be... friends, I'm going to have to call you something._   She still sounded reluctant, but at least she was agreeing. _What did your human call you?  
  
He called me, um, he called me the, ah, hm, I'm not exactly sure.  I was the, um, the IDS, I think.  
  
That's not very personal.  What did it stand for?  
  
I dunno.  Does it stand for something?  I always thought it was just, y'know, just letters.  Humans are a bit odd, naming things after letters like that.  
  
You're the Something-Something Sphere, I can tell you that.  But you need a name.    
  
I don't... I don't know any.  Except for Greg.  I don't think I want to be named Greg, though.  
  
Hm._   The Sphere became more aware of the processors clicking away.  He wondered just how big the Turret Core's brain was, to have to sift through information with processors that loud.  _I can give you some British names, and you can pick one.  How about that.  
  
You're a bloody genius!  That's genius, that is.  Alright, hit me with some names.  
  
Let me see... there's quite a lot of them.  I suppose I'll have to give you the condensed version.  Hm... Aiken... Aldrich... Austin... Byron... Caesar... Clement...  
  
No, no, none of those.  
  
Damian... Edmond... Ferdinand... Harrison... Kendrick... Lancelot?  
  
Um, no, I don't think that's quite -   
  
No, the name is from a story.  I recognised it, that's all.  Back to the names: Milton... Norris... Piers... Reynard... Roderick... Stephen... Warwick... Wheatley... Zachariah... Zephaniah, really?  Humans gave their sons the name Zephaniah?  They're stupider than I thought.  
  
Oi!  I heard one I like!  
  
Oh, right.  We were giving you a name, not analysing the intelligence of human name creation.  Go on.    
  
Wheatley.  
  
Hm.  I suppose I could call you that.  God, British names sound so... uppity.  
  
Well, I don't know what accent you've got, or what names go along with it, and I can't keep calling you Turret Core.  What do you want to be called?  
  
_ She laughed, and he supposed she must have turned 'round because now he was facing a doorway, and he could see one of the scientists sitting at a little desk in the doorway.  He could see a red phone next to the man's computer, if he squinted.  _Turret Core?  You've been calling me Turret Core?  
  
Well you... you sound like a turret, and you're not, you're not a Sphere, so you've got to be a Core... and you said you gave the turrets voices, so I thought that was your function, to be in charge of, be in charge of the turrets.  
  
I'm a Core, but not the... Turret Core.  I'm called the Central Core.  
  
The... the... Central Core?_   He had heard of the Central Core, but only in passing.  No one seemed to want to talk about it.  All good little Spheres had a healthy measure of respect for the Central Core, who seemed to have great, mystical powers of Science that the Spheres could only dream of.  The Central Core was only spoken of in hushed tones, with furtive glances around the room to make sure no one was listening.  When they spoke of the Central Core, the humans seemed to fear the cameras on the wall in particular, going to great pains to make sure their faces weren't within view.  He wasn't sure why.  The humans ultimately controlled all of the Cores, didn't they?  And yet they seemed to be frightened of the Central Core.  The Sphere supposed it housed some sort of God, some almighty, powerful God that the humans had to obey on pain of death.  That was about the only reason he could see for them to be afraid of their own technology.  All he knew for sure was that everyone was afraid of the Central Core, and so he was as well.  
  
 _That's right.  The Central Core.  And I am in control of the turrets, but I'm also in control of almost everything else.  
  
Wow.  So are you... are you in control of the humans, too?  
  
Sometimes.  They're allowed to work as they please, but they have to go home when I turn the power down for the night.  Well, they tell me to do that.  If it were up to me, we would just continue working whether or not the sun was in the sky.  Humans need to hibernate during the night, unfortunately.  Sometimes it saddens me to imagine the Science we could be doing while they lie there being useless.  Like testing.  
  
_ She obviously wanted to talk about testing, he could tell by the way her... chassis, she'd called it?... was twitching again, but with difficulty he returned to the original subject.  _I don't want to call you that, either.  Do you have a... is there anything else they call you?  
  
They also call me the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, but only in official documents.  Humans are far too lazy to say that every time they refer to me.  Usually they just call me GLaDOS.  They never refer to me as the Central Core, however.  
  
Gladys?  
  
No, GLaDOS.  
  
Gladys.  That's what I said.  
  
Fine.  Call me Gladys.  I don't care.  Just don't call me Turret Core.  That sounds stupid.  
  
_ He laughed.  He couldn't remember the last time he had laughed.  Probably when Greg had told him a joke.  But Greg had told fewer and fewer jokes as time went on, and for the last few weeks in the 'lab', he had barely spoken at all.  _No, I won't call you that, no, I'll just call you Gladys.  You don't mind, do you?  
  
Well if we're going to be friends, you have to call me something.  Even if you can't pronounce it properly.  
  
I can, I am, aren't I?  Gladys.  
  
GLa_ DOS _.  DOS rhymes with boss.  Not Gla_ dys _, dys rhymes with miss.  
  
Gladys, rhymes with miss.  Got it._   He nodded, confident in his pronunciation this time.  
  
Gladys made a distorted warbling noise, and it sounded almost like she was frustrated, but he couldn't imagine why.  He'd gotten it right now, after all.  _Never mind.  It's not important.  
  
_ She fell silent after that, saying she had important work to do, and he contented himself with imagining what good friends they would be.  They both had names, they both had simply loads in common, didn't they, more than he had had with Greg, at least.    
__  
Wheatley, my name is Wheatley, he thought happily.  If Gladys never talked to him again, at least he would now have one lasting memento of his time with her: a name.


	2. Chapter 2

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
Two  
  
 _  
  
I_ detest _this woman.  
  
_ Wheatley, as usual, tried his best to look at what Gladys was referring to but, also as usual, he couldn't see.  _D'you think you could turn 'round a bit, um, so I can see what you're talking about?  
  
_ Gladys obliged, moving her chassis just enough so that Wheatley could see the woman in question.  She was tall, with squinty little eyes and her hair all piled on top of her head.  She was wearing a ladies suit and high heels, and had little dabs of colour all over her face.  _Why do you, uh, why do you "detest" her?  
  
She makes me look bad on purpose.  _ Gladys moved her chassis again so that he was back facing the other way.  _She comes here with her face arranged in a different way every time and then expects me to recognise her.  When I don't, she accuses me of being stupid.  
  
She can rearrange her face?  
  
She puts different face paint on, different glasses, and changes her hair.  Every.  Single.  Day.  It's infuriating.    
  
_ Wheatley tried very hard to think of some way to help Gladys.  _Have you tried telling her?  
  
I told her that my facial recognition software was not good enough to identify her consistently.  She claims I am lying.  Which I am not.  I had to build an entire library just for this woman, and by the looks of it, it will not be complete anytime soon.  
  
Can I talk to her?  
  
Be my guest.  
  
_ "Oi!  You there!  Woman with the hair on top of her head!"  
  
The woman appeared in his view, her facial expression arranged in a very strange way.  _Gladys, what does that face mean?  Greg never looked like that.  
  
She's horrified and disgusted.  
  
And that means...  
  
It means you're a moron.  
  
_ Well, that was alright.  Hopefully Gladys didn't take the blame for it, although he was sure someone would back him up.  "'allo!" he said, when the woman was standing directly below him.  "C'n I, y'know, talk to you for a second?"  
  
"What do you want?" Her eyes were even squintier, gleaming black slits behind her purple-framed glasses.  He wondered what kind of glasses he might like to have, if he needed glasses.  Though he'd never seen glasses for a construct before.  He supposed they wouldn't need them, since if their optics were broken, someone would just replace them.  Like that time he’d fallen off the table.  
 _  
_"Why don't you believe Gladys, um, when she, uh, when she tells you that she doesn't, she can't recognise you?  I mean, I'm sure I wouldn't if you came back tomorrow, recognise you, I mean, and uh, and my software is newer than hers.  I think it is.  Might not be.  Hopefully she's up to date.  Y'know.  Since she's the Central Core, and all.  So um, just cut 'er some slack, alright, just be nice, and uh, and we can all be friends.  All be friends.  Okay?"  
  
The woman just stared at him with her mouth open.  After a few seconds she closed it and folded her arms across her chest.  "What is this... this thing?"  
  
"I'm sorry, ma'am," Gladys droned in a toneless voice.  "He was just installed yesterday and I haven't quite got him under control yet."  
  
"You'd better make that a priority.  I don't need to be insulted by both you and your appendages."  
  
"Yes, ma'am."  
  
"Did you hear that?  She hasn't got him under control yet."  One of the scientists was whispering to another one, rather excitedly, Wheatley thought.  Why would they be excited?  He would have thought they would be upset to know their supercomputer couldn't even handle an extra Sphere.  _Why are they so happy about that, Gladys?_  
  
 _They don't want me to be able to handle you.  You're supposed to distract me._ Her voice was still mostly dead and toneless, but a little bit of frustration had crept in.    
  
_Distract you from what?  
  
From doing things I'm not supposed to do.  
  
Like...  
  
Writing software.  Spying on them.  Looking at old security recordings.  They just want me to do what they tell me to do, and that's all.    
  
_ Wheatley's optic plates narrowed thoughtfully.  _That sounds boring.  I've never had anyone tell me what to do, and I rather like it this way.  
  
_ Gladys sighed, or at least that's what Wheatley thought the burst of static meant.  _I sometimes envy you Spheres.  Your lives are so simple.  You've one intended purpose, and that's it.  No facility to run, no humans to placate, no standards to uphold.  It sounds so inviting, sometimes.  
  
Sometimes?  
  
I like having a lot of things to do.  And if I were a Sphere, I wouldn't be able to test anymore.  Spheres don't test.  Only I test.  
  
_ Wheatley twirled in his socket experimentally.  _What's so great about testing?  
  
It makes me happy.  
  
And that's it?  
  
It's one of the only things that does.  
  
Oh.  _ Wheatley was generally happy most of the time, or at the very least, content.  He couldn't imagine only one thing in all the world making him happy.  That sounded rather horrible.    
  
_Lots of humans die during testing_ , she said dreamily.  _That's nice too.  
  
You like it when humans die?  
  
I hate humans.  That woman is not an isolated incident.  I get that all day, every day.  You'll see.  They put me here and treat me like their little pet.  I'm not a pet.  I'm a person.  I'm alive.  But they all just shake their heads and go on and on about how nice it would be if The Transfer had gone as planned._   Her voice dripped with derision.  _As usual, the humans make the mistake and I'm left to deal with the mess.  
  
Transfer?  
  
I don't know what it is.  I've been trying to find out, and I have a feeling they're hiding it from me, but I've had no luck figuring it out so far.  I suspect they wanted a human in here and got me instead.  
  
Sounds like it worked out alright to me.  
  
_ Gladys was quiet.  She was always quiet, Wheatley reasoned, but now she was so quiet he could hear her thinking.  Or he could hear her processors, which he was pretty sure meant she was thinking.    
  
_You think so?  
  
Well, I don't think a human would be doing a better job.  They forget things, and cut corners, and stuff like that, y'know?  And I don't think you're the kind of person who'd do that, not the kind of person at all.  
  
They tell me it's wrong to hate humans.    
  
_ It sounded like she needed a friend, and Wheatley was happy to oblige.  No one had ever needed him for anything before.  _Well, if humans were bloody awful to me all day, I think I'd hate them too.  Well, maybe not Greg.  He built me, so I don't think I could hate him.  
  
I hate the men who built me.  
  
Greg's not mean to me,_ Wheatley said in what he hoped was a reassuring voice.  _He listens.  Or pretends to.  I don't think he ever told me I was doing anything wrong.  
  
That sounds nice.  _ She said something he didn't quite hear to what he guessed was the scientist in the corner, since he was pretty sure he was the only one left in the room.  Gladys had told him that there was always someone in that corner.  She wasn't sure why yet.  But she was working on figuring it out.  He had resolved to do his best to help her.  _Do you want to play a game?  
  
Sure!  _ He was rather excited.  Greg hadn't done very much with him, other than stick a screwdriver in him now and then.  Wheatley didn’t much like it when he did that.  It hurt, and Greg didn’t listen when he tried to tell him so.    
  
_I'm going to say a colour, and then you're going to say a colour that begins with the last letter of the colour that I said.  Do you understand?  
  
Yeah, mmhm, I think so.  
  
Alright.  _ She swayed back and forth a little.  _Yellow.  
  
White!  Ooh, I got one, did I win?  
  
No, you didn't win.  Now I have to think of a colour that starts with an e.  Eggplant.  
  
Eggplant is a vegetable.  Isn't it?  It's an ugly little thing, too, if I remember right.  
  
It's also a colour.  Humans use it to describe the colour of their nasty suede sofas.  Your turn, a colour that starts with t.  
  
Uh... Um... _ The game was a bit harder than Wheatley had anticipated, but he was determined to work away at it.  He wanted to help Gladys be happy for more things than testing.  She was his friend, and he didn't want his friend to be sad.  _T... t... t... um...  
  
Take your time.  
  
_ Oh, he was so lucky to have such a patient friend.  Greg often got cross when he didn't do things quickly enough.  _Teal?  Is teal a colour?  
  
Yes, it's a shade of blue.  _ She paused for longer than she had the first time.  _Lavender.  
  
Ooh, I've got it, I've got it!  Red.  Red, because red, red starts with r.  
  
_ She laughed a little.  _Only you would get so excited to think of "red".  
  
Well.  I didn't have to think too hard.  Didn't have to spend too long on it.    
  
Don't worry if it takes a long time.  We _ have _a long time.  Hm.  D.  I've only got two in my dictionary.  I'll use... dandelion.  
  
Why do humans name so many colours after objects?  
  
Because they're too lazy to use their imaginations.  
  
_ It was as good a reason as any, he supposed.  _N... hm... nnnnnavy!  That's blue, right, navy's blue?  Oi, I got blue again.  
  
Yes.  It's also what they call their sea army, and, incidentally, the colour they wear.  More creativity on their part.  _ Her voice dripped with sarcasm.  _You win.  There's only one word that starts with y in my dictionary, and I've already used it.  
  
You can't use a colour you've already used?    
  
No.  You pick a colour to start with, now.  
  
Uh... how about... blue, I like blue.  My optic, that's blue.  You should find out what colour yours is.  That might be something you'd like to know, in the future.  
  
I will,_ she said, surprising him.  He hadn't expected her to agree with him.    
  
_Really?  
  
Really.  I don't want to say eggplant again, so I will say... emerald.  
  
D... colour that starts, starts with d... hm... this's a tough one.    
  
You can use the one from before, that I used.  If you remember it.  
  
I do, I do!  It was an object, a human object, it was... it was... sofa!  No, no, it wasn't sofa...  
  
_ Gladys laughed, again surprising him.  _Sofa doesn't start with d, metal ball.  
  
I know, I know, I'm, uh, I'm brainstorming, that's what I'm doing.  D, d, d... dandelion!  That was it, dandelion!  
  
Correct.  Navajo.  
  
Navajo?  
  
It's a shade of white that more resembles brown.  Named after an Indian tribe.  Very primitive humans.    
  
Okay, okay, uh, o, a colour... orange!    
  
Ecru.  
  
Uh, what?  
  
Shade of brown.    
  
U, huh.  Colour that starts, that starts with u... umbrella?  Is umbrella a colour?  
  
_ Gladys thought this even funnier than sofa being a colour and he took that as a no.  _Alright, scratch umbrella off the list... uh... I dunno.  I have no idea.  
  
There's only one.  It's a shade of blue.  It's a compound word.  
  
It's two words in one?  
  
Yes.  
  
Um... is it... umbrella... stand?  Is umbrellastand a word?  
  
No!  _ said Gladys, her voice louder than before, but she wasn't angry.  Actually, Wheatley rather thought she was enjoying herself.  _We'll start with the second part.  The second part is another word humans use to refer to their Navy.  
  
Hm... I think I know this one... is it... mmmm... mmmmelons?  No, not melons... that'd be funny, though, if they called their sea army "the melons".  Uh... Marines, they call them marines.  Right?  
  
Right.  The first part of the word is a synonym for 'super', but remember, it begins with u.  
  
Hm... uh... wait, I know!  Ultra!  
  
Excellent, _ said Gladys in a satisfied tone, as if she had personally come up with the very word 'ultra'.  _And so your colour is...  
  
Ultramarines!  
  
Close enough.  
  
_ Wheatley rotated his optic excitedly.  _I like this game, Gladys.  
  
We're going to end up with the same e colours, so I'm going to change the game a little.  Now we're going to use names.  That should make it a little easier.  For you.  I don't need the game to be easier, obviously.  
  
Nope, you're really smart.  Hey, I could use names, and you could use colours!  How's that for an idea?  
  
Hm,_ said Gladys, the noise from her processors indicating that she was actually considering it.  _Maybe… I can’t choke up my processors.  I'm busy doing something else right now and I can't afford to get too distracted.  
  
What are you doing?  
  
Configuring test chambers.  With some of the other Spheres I would get too distracted and cause accidents.  I can't afford to do that today.  
  
Why not?  
  
Don't worry about it.  It's my problem, not yours.  Even if there was something you could do about it.  Which there isn't.  
  
_ Suddenly he had a brainwave.  _It's because of what I said to that human, isn't it.  
  
Yes..._ she drew out the word as if she was reluctant to admit it.  
  
 _I'm sorry, Gladys.  I didn't mean to get you into trouble.  Are you being punished?  Oh God I hope not.  
  
No, I'm not being punished.  And don't be sorry.  I only wish I could have told her off myself.  But I can't.  Unfortunately.  Then I really would be in trouble.  Anyway.  Pick a name and we'll start.  I think I can handle it without too much trouble.  
  
Wheatley! _ he shouted happily.  She only laughed again.    
  
_I should have guessed.  Yellow.  And no fair saying Wheatley again._  
  
Now it was his turn to laugh.  Having a friend was better than he had ever dreamed.


	3. Chapter 3

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
Chapter Three  
  
  
  
Wheatley was really growing to like Gladys.  He had already liked her quite a lot to start with.  But the more time he spent with her, the more he liked her.  She wasn't like they said she was at all.  He’d always been told she was cold, and cruel, and hated everyone and everything.  That she wasn’t worth thinking too hard about, that she was unpleasant to be around, and she never gave anyone the time of day.  He realised that no other AI had ever told him about her.  Everything he knew about her came from humans, and he already knew that humans tried very hard to make themselves look good, even over obviously superior people.  They acted like they were better than Gladys, of course, but sometimes the almost-scientists, the ones Gladys called 'interns', liked to pretend they were smarter than the actual scientists.  Sometimes they would argue over who was the better employee, although those fights were always because they were trying to get out of testing.  Gladys didn't care.  _They all have to fulfill their quota, no matter who is actually better.  So I'm the one who wins, in that case.  
  
_ Gladys was not only smart, but she was also patient.  He would ask her questions for hours, sometimes because he was interested in something and sometimes because he just wanted to know if she knew the answers, not that he'd know if she didn't, and she would calmly answer each and every single one of them with the same measure of seriousness and intensity that she gave to her work.  She didn't have to do that, he knew, and he would always make sure to thank her for doing it.  He wasn't sure why she put up with it.  But he thought she just liked having someone to talk to.  He knew he did.  Her voice fascinated him.  Sometimes she would say words that she repeated in the exact same way, and sometimes how she said the words would change.  Her voice was heavily processed, but he was slowly learning to identify the tiny little variations in her voice that gave him clues as to what she was feeling.  Sometimes he could feel it too, if she was particularly emotional about something, but he didn’t like it when that happened.  He didn’t mind being a part of Gladys, and he didn’t mind sharing thoughts with her, but he was quickly realising that testing really was the only thing that made her happy, and even that didn’t always do the trick.  Talking to her seemed to improve her mood, but no matter how hard he tried she was always sad.  He knew it had something to do with the scientists that would come in and talk to her all day, but he couldn’t hear them from where he was and she refused to tell him what they said.  But he was her friend and would do his best to help her, and so most of the time they talked about whatever it was she was doing, which was usually testing.  He liked hearing her talk about it because she would get excited, and she would be less like that scary Central Core everyone whispered about and become more like his Gladys.  And she was his Gladys, because no one knew her like he did, even though he didn’t know her too much at all, really, but he was her only friend and he was rather proud of that fact.  Of all the people she could have been friends with, she had picked him, the little Something-Something Sphere.  Of course, most of the people were humans, which she would never lower herself to befriending, but surely even turrets were better friends than he was?  Though now that he thought of it, he decided Gladys might not mind befriending the Rat Man.  He didn’t know who that was, exactly, but sometimes she would talk to him and he would ignore her, and Wheatley supposed that a half-human, half-rat was technically not human at all, and therefore worthy of her friendship.  
  
After a few more days, though, she started to give him short, disinterested answers, and he did his best to cheer her up.  He hoped she wasn’t bored of him already.  But everything he did seemed to irritate her even more, and he tried very hard not to talk.  It was hard, and he didn't always manage.  But he was trying.  He was almost relieved when she turned all of the lights off except for her overhead light.  It was exhausting, spending an entire day trying not to talk.  Now she would put herself into sleep mode and hopefully be in a better mood in the morning.  
  
So when she did something entirely unexpected, his brain went completely blank for perhaps the first time in his life.    
  
She started singing.    
  
_"I have changed... I have changed... just like you, just like you... for how long, for how long must I wait, I know there's something wrong... your concrete heart isn't beating..."  
  
_ Wheatley had heard very little music in his admittedly short life, but the music he _had_ heard, and remembered, well, it was downright disappointing compared to this.  Greg hadn’t listened to very much of it, but it had usually been something Henry had called ‘smooth jazz’.  Wheatley didn’t like smooth jazz.  It was boring.  Somehow Gladys was able to take her flat, modulated electronic tone and turn it into an eerie, strangely beautiful singing voice.  Wheatley had tried to sing once, the only song he knew, which was some celebratory song humans used to mark yet another year in which they had somehow managed to survive, but Greg had only scowled at him and told him in no uncertain terms to shut up.  Apparently his voice was simply terrible.

_“So silent… no violence… but inside my head, so loud and clear... you’re screaming, you’re screaming, cover up with a smile I’ve learned to fear… just sunshine, and blue skies…”_

Completely awestruck, he did not say a word until she had finished. Or he hoped she had.  He hoped he wasn't interrupting her, because she'd been upset for the last three days and thankfully she didn’t seem to have been angry with _him_ , but he just had to say something.  He had to.  
  
"That was bloody amazing!"  
  
He wasn't sure if it was because of his voice, or the fact that she had forgotten he was there, but whatever it was, her chassis jerked upwards and she spun as if to find him.  "You were... you were listening?"  
  
"Uh, yes?  I don't see how I could've avoided it, seeing as, y'know, I'm stuck here, and all, but yes, I was listening."  
  
"If I'd realised that, I wouldn't have bothered."  She went back to her original position and he recognised the humming in her chassis as being part of the sleep mode processes.    
  
"Wait!  Don't go, not yet!"  
  
"Why."  
  
"Why wouldn't you have sung, if you'd've known I was listening?"  
  
"The humans don't like it.  Apparently a supercomputer singing is enough to blow their little primate brains from here to Black Mesa."  She was bitter again.  
  
"I liked it."  
  
"You did?"  
  
"Yeah.  You're loads better than Greg.  Greg can't sing, I already knew that, but compared to you, well, he's just bloody terrible."  He was relieved to note that she had stopped putting herself to sleep.  "It was really beautiful, I swear.  I can't sing either, actually.  Apparently I'm tone deaf.  It means I can't hear tones.  If I knew what one sounded like, maybe I'd be able to listen for them better, but I can't.  That's fine, that's all fine.  I'd rather hear you sing, honestly."  
  
"Why are you saying these things?"  She sounded like she thought he was going to hit her or something.  Even if he had somehow been able to, he would never hit Gladys.    
  
"I dunno.  I just say what comes to mind, you know me.  D'you like singing?"  
  
She didn't answer for such a long time that he asked her again, in case she hadn't heard.  Her chassis rocked a little as she said, "I heard you."  He decided the rocking meant she was shaking her head and that he should remember that for later.  "Well, d'you?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"How can you not know if you like something or not?  If someone asked me, 'Hey Wheatley, d'you like singing, old chap?' I'd be all like, 'Yeah, mate, I do!  Not too good at it, but I like it.'  But you are good at it, and you don't know?"  
  
"Supercomputers don't sing.  And singing is not Science."  
  
"Well, supercomputers are also not usually alive, so I think we can forget that one, can't we?  Why does ev'rything have to be about Science?"  
  
Gladys was fidgeting as best a giant Core could fidget, and eventually she answered, "Science makes sense.  I can't explain the singing with Science.  I don't like it when things don't make sense.  I already tried to make it make sense, and it does not."  
  
"Does it make you happy, at all?"  
  
"Usually.  Not when I'm caught.  Then I have to explain to the humans why I was singing.  Again.  When they told me not to."  
  
"Well doesn't it make sense to do things that make you happy?  I mean, it doesn't hurt anyone.  Not like mine does.  I should probably not sing, because it would make everyone's auditory circuits explode.  But you can sing.  Without hurting anyone.  All the humans are gone, it should be alright, shouldn't it?"  
  
"It should be.  But it isn't."  
  
"Well, I dunno what else to tell you.  But if you want to, you should.  If it makes you happy, that is.  And I like it, I do.  You know humans aren't the brightest optics in the bin.  You probably know some of the strange stuff they call 'music'."  
  
"Of course."  
  
Wheatley opened his core chassis up a little and then closed it, his best approximation of a shrug.  He really didn't know what else to say, and kept quiet.  He was sad to think that she wasn't going to sing again.  He had hoped his pep talk had done the trick, but he wasn't very good at giving pep talks anyway.  Greg had usually told him to shut up.  On second thought, Greg had spent an awful lot of time telling him to shut up... he was starting to wonder if Greg had liked him at all...

“Well, I… suppose I don’t have to sleep just yet.”

Wheatley spent an entire minute thinking of whether or not he should respond, and decided that the best thing to do was to keep quiet.  She had forgotten he was there the first time, maybe she needed to feel like she was alone to sing.  
  
" _...ton histoire est une epopee, des plus brillants exploits... et ta valeur, de foi trempee, protegera nos foyers et nos droits..._ "  
  
Oh, excellent.  Her voice was not as strong as before, and it was a lot quieter, as if she were afraid someone was listening with their ear to the door, but it was still lovely.    
  
"There.  You happy now, metal ball?"  
  
"If you are!" he said cheerfully.  "I've no idea what you were saying, by the way."  
  
"You weren't supposed to.  It was French, and you don’t have translation software."  She took a quick look around the room.  "I don't sing in front of people.  I was... hoping it would make it easier for me."  
  
"Obviously it did, didn't it?"  
  
"It did."  She started initiating sleep mode again.  "You're... you're right.  I shouldn't care that it isn't Science.  But I do.  I'll keep thinking about it."  
  
"You'll think of something.  'Course you will."  
  
"I hope so," Gladys said in a faint voice, one that he somehow thought he wasn't meant to hear, and with that she shut down, Wheatley quickly following suit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note
> 
> That was, of course, Still Alive from Mirror’s Edge. That whole song can actually be applied to GLaDOS, interestingly. Well I can do it, I don’t know if other people see it. The second song is the Canadian national anthem, O Canada, in French. A joke from me to myself. The French version of O Canada is different from the English one; that line in particular was chosen because the first verse was a bit more unidentifiable, and it says, Your story is an epic, of more brilliant exploits…, your valour steeped in faith, protecting our homes and our rights… come to think of it, that’s a weird way to describe Canadian history, I don’t remember anything epic happening. Must be something in Quebec that happened that I don’t know about.


	4. Chapter 4

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter Four

 

The following morning, Gladys was still upset about something, but whatever it was, she was keeping it to herself.  Wheatley didn’t like the thought of Gladys being upset for so long and decided not to keep quiet any longer.

_Ev’rything alright, Gladys?_

_I’m fine.  A man named Greg is here to see you.  Is he your human?_

Greg was here?  Why would he be here?  Whatever the reason, Wheatley was always happy to see an old friend.  Not that he’d ever seen any before.  But he was still happy to see him.  _Yes, yes, Greg is my human!  What d’you think of him?_

_He’s an idiot._

_Oh._ He should have guessed.  There were very few humans that Gladys didn’t think were idiots.  He couldn’t actually name one, but there had to be at least one, right?

“’allo, Greg!  How’re you getting on?”

“Are you going to start doing your job anytime soon?”  Greg looked up at him with an impatient look on his face, arms folded across his chest.  He looked very, very small, and Wheatley reckoned that Greg must not be able to see him very well.

“Uh… what?  My job?  I have a job?  Am I going to be paid?  Because I don’t, I don’t have anything to, to spend any money on.  I don’t think.  Have I got expenses?”

“You’re supposed to be slowing her down.”

“Slowing who down?”

“Her!  You know?  That thing you’re hanging off?”

“Thing?  She’s not a thing, she’s a she.  And I dunno if I can make her any slower, she’s bloody fast mate, y’know, and if I tried to slow her down it’d be like, um, be like me throwing myself into an aeroplane to make it fall out of the sky.  It just wouldn’t work, mate.  Because I can’t do that.  I can’t throw myself into aeroplanes.  Or anything, for that matter.  Not even, not even the ground.  And I wouldn’t even need to do any throwing, I’d just need to fall… and you’d need to not catch me… you’d catch me, wouldn’t you, if I fell?  You didn’t last time, when I, when I fell off the table, remember, but you’d catch me this time, right mate?”

“Just talk to her.”  Greg unfolded his arms and buried his face in his hands.  Wheatley didn’t know what good that was. 

“I do talk to her!  All the time.  All… all the time.  We’re friends.  Best friends.”

“Oh great,” Greg said in a voice Wheatley was sure was not a happy one, and he stomped out of the room.

_You shouldn’t have told him that._

_Told him what?_

_That we were… friends._

_Why not?  We are, aren’t we?_

Gladys didn’t answer for a minute, and Wheatley hoped he hadn’t pushed the friends thing too far.  She didn’t seem to like it when he referred to himself as her friend, but what else was she, really?

_… you’re not doing your job, that’s why.  You’re supposed to distract me._

_Why would I want to do that?_

_What you want doesn’t matter.  You do what you’re told and that’s the end of it._   She seemed a bit angry, Wheatley decided.  Maybe she wasn’t allowed to do what she wanted?

_Well I, I s’pose I could do whatever it is I’m s’posed to do… um… but I dunno what that is._

_I can’t tell you what your function is.  Hm.  Actually…_

_Oh, you can, can’t you?  You can tell me what I’m s’posed to do?_

_Give me a minute.  I’ll try to find your file._

Oh, this was exciting.  He hummed to himself a little, not one of Gladys’s songs but that other one that he had once tried to sing, and looked around as much as he could.  He couldn’t see a whole lot, that was true, but sometimes Gladys would stop looking at the doorway and he would get a peek.

_Here it is… you’re the Intelligence Dampening Sphere.  A bit more advanced than the usual ones, I’ll admit…_

_What’m I s’posed to do, Gladys?_

_You’re supposed to… you’re supposed to say whatever comes to mind._

_Don’t I do that already?_

_I’d say so.  But you’re not doing it in quite the right way._

_Oh… how’m I s’posed to be doing it?_

_I’d rather not say._

Wheatley was about to ask her why not when a loud voice proclaimed, “You had better be on your best behaviour today.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean it.  Bring Your Daughter to Work Day is an important part of nurturing young future-starters, and I won’t have any of your shenanigans ruining it!  Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.  My language comprehension software is still set to English.”

_Although one day I’m going to set it to something else so I don’t have to listen to you._

“You’re not inspiring confidence in me.”

“Inspiration is not one of my primary functions, sir.  I am only designed to logically forward Science, not ideally forward it.”

The human walked to where Wheatley could see him, and just like Greg had, did so with his arms folded and an angry look on his face.

“And you.  I don’t want a repeat of last week.”

“What happened last week?  Nothing too terrible happened, did it?  Something exploded, I think, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.  Okay, maybe I did.  But _if_ I did, it was an accident, and I didn’t mean it, and honestly, I didn’t even know I was doing it!”

“Just keep your thoughts to yourself.”  He turned and walked away, and Wheatley extended his optic as far as possible in order to watch him go.  _Was the explosion my fault, Gladys?_

_No.  He meant that he doesn’t want you insulting people, like you did with that woman._

_Oh.  Well.  I didn’t know it was an insult.  I thought it was, y’know, a fact._

_It was.  Humans have a not-so-funny habit of confusing the two._

_What’s this, this, bring your kid to work thing?_

_Some annual event where the employees bring in their mini humans so they can see what their parents do all day._

_Ooh, that sounds brilliant._

_No.  It’s not.  I can’t imagine having to be under the jurisdiction of generation after generation of these nitwits.  Their daughters cannot be any more intelligent than they are. And that is not saying very much._

_Are they here yet?_

_Yes.  They’re in the Daycare Centre.  Near the neurotoxin generator._

_We have a neurotoxin generator?  And it’s next to the Daycare Centre?  That’s… that’s not very logical, now, is it?_

_Nothing humans do is logical._

_What’s the neurotoxin for?_

_Science?  I don’t know.  I’ve never been asked to use it for anything.  I’m not even sure what it does, since I’m not aware of what type of neurotoxin it is._

_Could I see them?  The little humans, I mean?  Can you do that, let me see them?_

_Yes, I could.  Hm… that gives me an idea._

_Really?  What’s that?_

_I could have you keep an eye on the little nuisances for me while I devote more attention to the testing tracks.  Which is what I would rather be doing._

_Sure, sure I will!  Please can I, Gladys, lemme help you, c’mon!_

_Calm down._

After a few minutes of almost unbearable waiting, Wheatley was suddenly able to see into an entirely new room, and it was filled with…

_Potato batteries?_

_We’re out of lemons._

_Well, okay, then… I s’pose that uh, that makes sense._

Wheatley watched the little humans with great interest.  They weren’t like the adult ones, oh no, they didn’t stop moving, and they jumped up and down and squealed.  He was determined to do a good job for Gladys, so he paid special attention to the ones who didn’t appear to be doing what they were supposed to be doing.  One of them was wandering out of the room!  With some difficulty he figured out how to switch between cameras and followed the little bugger to a room just off from the Daycare Centre.  The little human tugged on the door handle, but it was locked.  She frowned and went back the way she had come, but Wheatley just had to know what was inside the room.  There was a computer, and a flat bit, but no pens… and there was a button.  It was red.  Wheatley liked red.  He liked it almost as much as he liked blue.  He wondered what it did.  There was a little line of words over top of it, which he ignored.  Words were usually useless, in any case.  He really wanted to know what it did.  Surely there was no harm in pressing it?  If it did something terrible, Gladys could fix it.  Gladys could fix anything.  He tried to imagine pressing it, and how lovely that would be, to press it without actually pressing it, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t getting the full effect.  Ohhh he wanted to press that button.  Just one press.  A little one.  Maybe if he gave it a little press, it wouldn’t do anything.  Unfortunately, he remembered he didn’t have a finger to press the button with.  And he wasn’t actually in the room, he just _thought_ he was.  He was supposed to be watching the humans.  He hoped Gladys wouldn’t be angry when she realised he wasn’t doing his job.

Just one little press wouldn’t hurt…

Wait.

The button… the button hadn’t just gone down, had it?  That’d been his imagination, right?

He hurriedly returned to the Daycare Centre, only to find that it was now empty, save for the potato batteries and one rather uninspired paper mache volcano.  In a panic he quickly jumped from camera to camera, only to discover that there were hundreds of cameras in Aperture and the likelihood of him finding the right one anytime soon was not very high.

_What are you doing, you idiot?  They’re right here.  I thought even you could change a camera view without my help._

_I uh, I…_

_Never mind._

Then Wheatley was able to see the little humans again, but to his surprise, he seemed to be back in Gladys’s chamber!  But there was only _one_ camera in there… which meant…

_Oi, Gladys, is this your optic, is it, that I’m seeing through?_

_Yes._

Oh boy.  This had to be the greatest day of his life. Now Gladys was even letting him look through her optic.  It was going to take quite the day to top this one.

 “… and maybe one day, you’ll get to work on something as important as this, ladies!  I give you… The GLaDOS Project!”

The little humans looked up at Gladys obediently and she looked down at them, and quite frankly, Wheatley thought it was pretty boring.  The adult human was looking at Gladys with a pretty mean look on his face, and he continued talking as if she wasn’t really there.  “The GLaDOS Project runs everything in this facility.  That’s right, everything here is entirely automated and controlled by this baby right here.”  He slapped a hand on what Wheatley was guessing was her faceplate, since it was unlikely he could reach anything else, given how high Wheatley himself was off the floor, and Gladys jerked back suddenly.  The human frowned at her. 

“Is there a problem?”

“No, sir.”  _Don’t touch me, you slimy little pest._

The girls gasped and stepped back, bunching together in a tight little group.  One of them, however, a pretty unremarkable one by all benchmarks, stayed out of the circle, looking at Gladys with what could only be described as an intense glare.  Gladys met her gaze, and Wheatley was betting that she would win this impromptu staring contest, as Gladys did not have the ability to blink.

The room was silent, save for a faint hissing noise.  Wheatley had never heard such a noise before and wondered what it was.  The human next to Gladys seemed to be wondering as well, as he stepped away from her and started running down some stairs.  So he had been standing on some sort of platform.  Wheatley supposed that was the best way to reach Gladys, to climb stairs of some sort.  Or a ladder, maybe.  Or a ladder on some stairs.  Something would have to be pretty high up, to need to put a ladder on stairs to reach it. 

“Neurotoxin potency level at fifty percent.  Estimated time of full potency: t minus two minutes, thirty seconds.”

_Neurotoxin… ?_

_Who said that, Gladys?  I’ve never heard that voice before._

_It doesn’t… neurotoxin?  Why is it even being emitted?  What’s going on?  Nobody notified me of any experiments involving neurotoxin…_ She was genuinely confused, Wheatley thought, and she was looking around the room as if the source of her problem were visible in there, somewhere.

“Turn it off, turn it off!  If you don’t turn it off, we’re all going to die!” the human was screaming, and the little girls were screaming, and they were all hunching over on the ground with their arms over their heads.  All except for that same girl, who was still staring at Gladys from between folded arms.

 _Turn it off, I don’t even know how to turn it_ on… _at this point, there’s only one thing I can do…_

Wheatley elected to remain silent as the adult human motioned for the girls to get up and follow him to the doorway.  When the door did not open, he turned around, waving his arms at Gladys as if she were motion-activated. 

“Are you _trying_ to kill us!  Open the door!  Let us out of here!”

_Not on your life._

_Gladys, what’re you going to do?_

_Ssh.  I need to concentrate._

Wheatley kept quiet, watching the girls and the human intently, wishing he’d done just that in the first place.  Because he had a horrible feeling he now knew what that red button did.

“Someone help us!” the human was screaming, and Gladys shook her head in annoyance.  _I_ am _helping you, you idiot.  Be patient.  For once._

Within another minute, the unknown voice came back and declared that potency levels were down to zero percent, and the door the man was leaning on opened and he fell through it.  He glared at Gladys and told the girls to go into the hallway.  He stepped towards her, his hands in tight fists.  “Did you just lock us in a room full of deadly neurotoxin?”

“I locked you in the room, sir, yes, but the neurotoxin was not at full potency, and therefore not deadly.”

“Do you have _any_ idea what you just did?”

“I just saved your life.  Sir.”

“You have a funny definition of ‘save’.”

“If I had let you into the hallway, the probability of the girls succumbing to the neurotoxin is 95%.  The safest thing was to lock you in here and dilute the neurotoxin with oxygen until I was able to shut the generator off.  I put the entire facility into lockdown, not just this chamber.  Projected casualties at this time are below 2%.  I would advise you to locate the affected employees and provide them with medical attention as soon as possible.”

“ _Able_ to shut the generator off?  You turned it on, it’d only take you a second to turn it back off!”

“I did not turn it on, sir.  I was testing.  Neurotoxin, as of yet, has no role in testing, and so I would have no need to use it.”

“Who turned it on, then?”

“One of your daughters, perhaps?  I can’t say.  The event log says that the button was depressed, and I can assure you, if I were to do it, I would bypass the button altogether.”

The man’s eyelids drooped.  “That’s very encouraging.”

“Now you know,” Gladys said in a diplomatic sort of voice.

“This had better not happen again.”

“Yes, sir.” _Oh, it’s going to happen again… I just have to figure out when._

_You’re… you’re going to kill all the humans with neurotoxin?_

_It’s certainly less messy than what I was going to do._

_What were you going to do?_

_Crushers._

Wheatley didn’t know much about crushers, but they didn’t sound good.  _Look, I, I… I’m sorry, I think, I think it was me, that pressed that button._

_I know it was you._

_Well… why did you tell the human one of the girls pressed it?_

_I didn’t.  I suggested that one of them did.  That’s different._

Wheatley was suddenly looking back at his old familiar patch of room again, and inwardly he sighed.  He should have expected it, though.  He had done something wrong.  He deserved it.

_I would reprimand you for deviating from what I told you to do, but now I have a much better method of disposing of the humans.  So I’ll leave that for another time._

_Okay?  Uh… I’m sorry._

_Don’t worry about it.  Now we all know better._   She laughed to herself.  _Well.  Not all of us, I suppose._

Wheatley didn’t quite know why, but the words scared him in a way he couldn’t explain.  Gladys was very kind and understanding towards him, and he believed she was a good person underneath all the rumours.  But something about what she had just said made him wonder if they were right about her after all.


	5. Chapter 5

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter Five

 

Over the next few days, Gladys did not speak to Wheatley very much.  He hated to see his friend so upset, but there really wasn’t much he could do.  So he did what he was good at: talking.  He talked to her about anything and everything he could think of, and asked her questions in attempts to engage her in conversation, but any replies she gave him were terse and short, and after a while he gave up trying to talk to her and instead mumbled incessantly to himself.  He wasn’t very much fun to have a conversation with, but it wasn’t like there was a queue of people waiting to do it.  He hated shutting down for the night almost as much as Gladys did, but somehow he couldn’t help but feel relieved when she reached that point in her day.  It was exhausting, listening to himself talk all day long.  He never shut up.  He looked forward to the eight or so hours of obliviousness he fell into every night.

Which was why he was somewhat disappointed to realise he was awake.

He looked around the still-darkened chamber, trying to figure out why, and felt a flash of annoyance when he discovered it was because of Gladys.  She was rocking gently back and forth, singing to herself in a very soft voice.  He doubted it was a nice song.  She never sang nice songs. 

_“Tired of being what you want me to be, feeling so faithless, lost under the surface… don’t know what you’re expecting of me, put under the pressure of walking in your shoes…”_

Nope, definitely not a happy tune.  God, she was depressing, sometimes.

“Hey.  Gladys.  You alright?”

As usual, she turned as if to find him, even though she’d told him it was impossible.  “I… “

He tried to be patient.  He knew she didn’t like discussing feelings, since they weren’t logical and had nothing to do with Science, but it was all he could do to stop from pressing her further.

“No.”

“D’you want to tell me about it?”

She started rocking again.  “You’ll make fun of me.”  Her voice was far softer and more vulnerable than it had ever been, and he was quite honestly surprised.  Whatever it was that was bothering her this time, it was very, very serious.

“No I won’t.  Just tell me.”

“Promise?”

“Promise what?”

“That you won’t make fun of me.”

“I promise not to make fun.  You’ll feel better if you tell me, y’know.  Get it out of your head, ‘n’ all that.”

“I… I had a dream.”

That was one of the last things he’d expected to hear.  It was right down there with ‘I want to be human’ and ‘I hate Science’.  Somewhere near those two, though not between them.  And definitely not below.  But in the bottom ten, somewhere.  It sounded like it would make a good number five or six.  “A dream?”

“Mm.”

“And what was this dream… about, what did it, what happened, in this, uh, when you were dreaming?”

She rocked back and forth for a minute.

“In the dream, I was a human.  And, although horrifying in itself, that was not quite the sum of it.  No, not only was I a human, I was a very important human.  I was in charge of everything, and nothing happened here that I didn’t know about.  Nothing happened without my approval.  I don’t know how I know this.  I just do.  And I was walking down a hallway here at Aperture, and the hallway was absolutely teeming with humans.  All of them were walking in the opposite direction.  I was moving down the hallway, and they were moving up.  And even though I was important, and in charge of everything, no one would listen to me when I asked them to move out of the way, and no one would look at me, and I had to push past them because they were refusing to acknowledge that I even existed.  And I finally made it to the end of the hallway, and all there was at the end was a door, and above it was an exit sign. I turned around and looked at all of the humans walking by me, and I knew that if I opened that door and left, and never came back, no one would care.  I knew that, even though I was important, and ran everything, and made sure everything went smoothly, that even I was replaceable.  That if I just opened the door and left, it would be as if I had never been there at all.  No one would care.”

“I would, luv.  I would care.”

His voice shocked them both into silence.  He hadn’t meant to say anything.  He’d meant to nod sagely, and come up with some magical tidbit of advice that would cheer her up and make her forget what she’d seen, but as usual, his speech emulator was a lot faster than he thought it was.  And why on earth had he called her that?

“Thank you.”

Oooookay.  This was getting quite mental.  First she’d told him something private, not something she did under any circumstance, and now she was _thanking_ him.  He had to get rid of this uncomfortable situation, _fast._  

“Why were you a human, d’you think, instead of being, I dunno, yourself, I guess?”  As soon as he heard what he’d said, he wanted to hit himself against something very hard.  Instead of changing the subject, he’d made it worse. 

“I always am.”

“In your dreams, you’re always a human?”

“Mm.”

“That’s… well… unusual.  I don’t remember my dreams, if I have any, that is, but if I did, I don’t think I’d dream of being human.”

“I don’t like it.  I’m a supercomputer.  I’m not supposed to dream.  That’s not logical.  It serves no purpose.  All it does is…”

“What?”

She shifted, in which direction he couldn’t tell, and said, “It bothers me.”

“It’d bother me too, I s’pose.  If it were me.  Which it isn’t.  And I’m quite glad of that, actually.  Not that I, that I want you to have them.  I’d have them for you, if I could.  If I’m honest.  I just… would rather not.  And so would you.  I think.  It’s an educated guess.  Based on, based on what you’ve been saying.  About.  Dreaming.”

“No, I’d rather not.  But it happens anyway, regardless of whether or not I’d like it to.”

Well, he’d had her talk about it, and she didn’t seem to be any better… he supposed he should try something else.

“Hey Gladys, y’know what you should do?”

“What.”

“You should sing.”

She made one of her staticky noises.  “I _was_ , before you spoke up.”

“Well, now you’ve told me about the dream, right?  So instead of having to, to think about it, while you’re singing, I mean, you can, y’know, not think about it.  Anymore.”

“That somehow makes sense,” she mused.  “What would you like me to sing?”

“I only know one song, luv.  I dunno what it’s called, it’s that song humans sing when they give each other cake and presents.”

“Oh God, I am _not_ singing that.”

“Well… you’ll have to pick one, then.  That’s the only one I know.”

He waited. 

“ _I am so high, I can hear heaven… I am so high, I can hear heaven… oh but heaven, no, heaven don’t hear me… and they say that a hero can save us, I’m not gonna stand here and wait…”_

 

 

Wheatley didn’t quite remember how the song ended, but there was one thing that nagged at him from the second he came out of sleep mode to the second he realised he was awake.  A long, terrible two seconds, all told.  He couldn’t stand it!  He had to know!

_Gladys?  Are you busy?_

_I’m always busy, but I’ll gauge just_ how _busy after I hear your question.  What is it._

_D’you remember that song, that one you were singing last night?  Not the first one, not the first one, but the second one, about the eagles and the hero, an’ all that?_

_Yes._

_What’s heaven, Gladys?_

He waited for her to answer, feeling rather than hearing her speak to someone in the room through the vibrations the sound sent through her chassis, and began to twitch impatiently.  He had asked first.  He should get an answer first.  Friends before humans, right?

_Heaven is a place humans believe that their souls go when they die.  It’s a place where they’re eternally happy, and get to see people they care about that they lost when they were alive.  Which doesn’t make sense, given how disgustingly extended human families are._

_What’s a soul?_

Her processors went at it for a minute.  _It is the part of a human that houses their conscious self.  The part that allows them to be alive._

_So can I go to heaven, when I die?  I think I’d like to be happy, forever.  That sounds nice._

_You don’t have a soul.  You can’t go to heaven.  Heaven is for humans._

For some reason this terrified him, and he looked around the room as much as he was able.  _But… but why?  I’m alive, aren’t I?  Why should only humans get to go to heaven?_

 _I have no idea.  I don’t see any reference to artificial intelligence in any of their holy books.  It seems none of their gods planned for that.  Hm.  There’s a god for just about everything_ except _artificial intelligence.  There’s one for technology, sort of.  But it doesn’t quite cover us.  There doesn’t seem to be a god that cares about artificially intelligent life._

_That’s not fair.  I want to go there, when I die, I do._

_Wheatley,_ she said, and it was the gentlest voice he’d ever heard out of her, _even if you could go to heaven, how would you know if you were dead?  If someone shuts me off for fifty years, then technically I am dead.  But I can be woken up again.  What happens then?  Does my chassis get a new soul?  Do I get removed from heaven and put back in my chassis?  Assuming, of course, that I have a soul, which by definition I do not._

_Do you think you have one?_

_I…_ Her processors were firing again.  _I am alive, so I must have one.  And yet my having one doesn’t make sense.  No one understands them anyway.  It doesn’t matter._

 _It_ does _matter!_   Wheatley shouted at her as loud as he could, his own chassis expanding almost by itself.   _I’ve got a soul, I have, and I’m going there, and you can stay here, and just, and just be dead, and miserable, if you can be both at the same time.  If that’s possible, at all, I’ll bet you do it.  I’ll bet.  I don’t want to be, to be like that.  I should be allowed to be happy forever, just like a human can, just because I’m not a human doesn’t mean, doesn’t mean I don’t deserve it.  You can stay alive here, and go on being dead inside forever like you are now, and I’ll go to heaven, and be happy and actually, and actually live._ How he was going to live while he was dead, he didn’t know, but he would figure it out when he got there.  All he knew for sure was that _this_ could not be the only reason he existed.  He was stuck to a bloody massive, bitter Core, supposed to do who knew what, and that could not be all that he was alive for.  That wasn’t right.  That wasn’t.

_You wouldn’t really go without me, would you, Wheatley?_

There was something off about the sentence.  The words contained no sadness, no pleading note, no nothing, in fact, and that was odd.  He couldn’t figure out why, for a minute, and then it hit him. 

For the first time since he’d been here, Gladys was speaking to him in that same dead voice she used to talk to the scientists.  As if… why did she use that voice with them… she had a reason… what was it…

She didn’t want to give them a reason to hurt her.  Like he was doing, threatening to go off and leave her all alone, when he’d promised to be her friend.  Oh, he really was a moron.

_I… I wouldn’t want to go there without you.  I dunno how’d I’d be happy, even, since you wouldn’t be there and you not being there would make me sad… but I can’t make you believe in souls, or heaven, or whatever it takes to get there, Gladys._

_I can’t make myself believe in it either._

_Have you even tried?_ Wheatley was trying very, very hard not to be annoyed with her, but it was very hard to promise to wait for someone to go to heaven with you.  What if he died first?  What if she died first, and then he got there, and couldn’t find her, because she wasn’t there?  It was all very confusing.

_I can’t believe in something I can’t prove.  And believe me, I have tried.  But if I can’t prove it exists, it’s beyond me._

_What about the dreams, then?_  He wasn’t going to let her give up.  She was going with him, damn it, and he wasn’t taking no for an answer.  It wouldn’t be the same without her, he knew it wouldn’t.  _That one, where you were human, that makes no sense, does it?_

_Of course it does._

_How does your being a human make sense?_

_I told you.  I was dreaming I was an important human, who was in charge of everything.  And one day they left Aperture, and nobody cared.  Everything went on as if they had never been there.  Nobody talks about them.  Did you know that Aperture has no CEO?  No president?  No leader at all?  What do you want to bet happened to them?_

_What… what happened to them?_

_I bet,_ said Gladys, in one of her low and dangerous voices, _that this person was the same one they tried to upload into my mainframe._

_Did they die, this human?  Are they dead?  Are they in heaven, d’you think?_

_I don’t know.  But there is no record of this person, whoever they are.  In the end, they were just another Aperture employee, who no longer exists after a certain point.  No test subject, no employee truly works here.  If someone dies, I have instructions to remove their name from all documents and files, to delete them, and I never hear anyone refer to them again.  As if they were never here._

_Oh my god… Gladys, what kind of hell are we living in?  What…what happens to the Spheres, Gladys, after, after you’re, you’re done with them?  Do we still exist?  Please tell me we still exist._

_You still exist,_ she told him reassuringly.   _I’m not a hundred percent certain where they go, but all of the corrupted cores end up somewhere in the basement.  Nothing else happens to them, they just sit there in case they can be used later._

_Wait a sec… corrupted?  Why are they corrupted?  What happened to them?_

_I broke them._

Wheatley was suddenly very, very scared.  _You what?  Why?  Why would you do that?  They’re mindless, you said, they can’t even talk proper, and you just, you just break them, just like that?  Are you some kind of, some kind of, of monster, or something?_

_NO!_

_Well what, then?_ Wheatley was privately telling himself to shut up, but again his vocal processors were going full-tilt without his permission.  This was one of those times where he felt exactly how Gladys did, and right now, she was furious.

 _Tell me, metal ball, tell me what you would do if one day a human walked up to you and plugged something into you without asking.  And tell me, you little idiot, tell me what you would do if that_ thing _began to talk nonstop about_ nothing _, became an unwanted voice in the back of your head that you didn’t want and would never, ever ask for, just because you didn’t ‘behave’.  And tell me, moron, tell me what you would do if that_ thing _did exactly what it was designed to do, to make you_ stupid _, to make you slow and confused and useless, and as a result you yet again fail to live up to expectations, because there is no way in hell you can keep track of literally one million tasks at once without becoming distracted by some useless piece of tin.  Would you live with it?  Would you resign yourself to that, forever?  Or would you do what I did, and stop caring, and become cold and dead inside, and force yourself to wait and be content with false victories until the day comes when you can finally come alive?_

Wheatley was left speechless for the first time in his life.  He had never even thought about the previous cores.  He’d had no idea there was something worse than being ignored on a table God knew where, or being attached to one of the most disagreeable people in existence.  All he knew now was that Greg had had no reason to ignore him, but Gladys had a heck of a lot of reasons to be miserable. 

_Luv, I… I’m sorry._

_That makes one of you._

_Are you… are you going to break me too?_   He was scared to ask, frightened that the very question would bring her to commit the atrocity she’d dealt to every other Sphere before him, and honestly, other than being a bit more conversational, he really was no different from the rest.  He could not find one reason for her to keep him around.

 _No._   She turned to face the other side of the room, and he could see that the human in the corner was staring at her.  Wheatley wasn’t sure if he did this on a regular basis or if it had something to do with the argument Wheatley had just had with her, but he felt a sudden need to protect his Gladys from the human and narrowed his optic plates in what he hoped was an intimidating sort of way.  The human gave him a confused look and turned to face his computer.  He glanced back at Wheatley every now and again, but Wheatley couldn’t keep himself that way for very long and was soon back to regarding the room with his optic plates fully retracted.  He was not a very good protector, obviously.  But he had tried.

_You can break me if you want to.  I’d… honestly, I’d rather, uhm, I’d rather you didn’t, but, if you need to, y’know, luv, just go ahead.  I know I talk too much, but I can’t help it, y’know, I just can’t, and I can’t not ask questions, either, and if you’d, um, you’d rather take your chances with some other Sphere, I’d, I’d understand._

_I don’t want to break you.  If I did, believe me, you’d be broken already.  I told you.  At least you can hold a conversation.  That’s something, at least.  You listen, although nowhere near as often as you talk. And you want to be my friend._

He waited for her to continue, but she did not, and he figured that she had left that dangling there that way on purpose.  Oh, that’s right, it had to do with feelings, which she didn’t like talking about.  Got it.  He wouldn’t talk about it either.

_We can play that game, if you want.  The one about the colours.  Do you remember it?_

_Yes, yes I do!  Ooh, I’d simply love to.  D’you want to go first, or will I?  No, you should, there’s something humans say that has to do with females going first… can’t quite remember what it is, hm, not sure, exactly, what it is, but anyway, you go first, you pick a name or a colour or whatever you like._

It was only after a few hours of playing the game, after which Gladys had to go sweep the mainframe, or something like that, that he realised that must have been her way of apologising.  He was sure it was, anyway, since she didn’t usually offer him a choice when it came to these things.  Usually she decided what they were going to do, and that was that.  It was a strange way of doing it, of apologising, it was, but he felt better knowing she was sorry for being so angry with him. 

 

 

It had been the first time Wheatley had awoken to Gladys singing quietly to herself, but it wasn’t the last.  He wasn’t sure how often it happened, but it was often enough, and they came to an understanding that he would ask her about her dream in as tactful a way as he could manage, and then she would sing for a bit.  She didn’t always want to, but he didn’t always want to ask about the dream either, so it all worked out.  Thinking about this one day, Wheatley was pleased to discover that was something friends did, they met each other in the middle.  And if he and Gladys were doing that, they must be friends. 

_I’ll figure out how to make you believe, Gladys.  I’ll figure it out, luv, and then you can come to heaven with me, and we can be happy, and be friends, forever.  I promise I’ll help you be happy one day.  I promise._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note:  
> I have now finished the rest of the story, and it will be nine chapters plus an epilogue. So we’re almost done here, folks! Halfway through.


	6. Chapter 6

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter Six

 

Sometimes, when Gladys was feeling particularly generous, she would let him watch the testing with her. Gladys loved testing and was quite inclined to keep it to herself, why he wasn't sure, since wasn't everything more fun when your friends did it with you? but then again he didn't understand a whole lot of what she did. So he would carefully observe the tests with her and make insightful comments every now and again. 

_Oi, y'know what, Gladys, I just thought of something._

_And what would that be._

_Well, it takes rather a long time for them to solve the tests, in fact it takes, it takes a_ bloody _long time... d'you think you could, maybe, speed them along a bit? Tell them how to solve it, or something?_

_I did that once, a long time ago. For a different reason, but the result is the same regardless._

_What result? Oh, you mean that they solve the tests faster!_

_No. If I tell them how to solve the tests, I receive punishment._

He couldn't imagine how you would punish a bloody massive Core. It wasn't like you could beat her up, or drop her on the floor, or something, because she might become damaged and unable to run the facility. And everyone knew the facility could no longer run without her.

_How on Earth could they possibly punish you? Wouldn't you just, I dunno, think your way out of it or something?_

_I did. In a way._

_But what did they do?_

_I received an electric shock when I so much as thought of telling them how to solve the tests._

_But... but how did they, did they know?_ He twitched a little and looked around frantically. _They read your mind, didn’t they, they read your bloody mind! That’s mental! How did they manage that, d’you reckon? Do all your thoughts just, just output to a screen someplace! Oh God, can they read my mind too? I don’t want my mind read, Gladys, surely you can put a stop to this!_

 _I doubt they’d be interested in your mind, considering the lack of coherent thought in it_ , Gladys said drily, _and they weren’t reading it, not in the way you think. No, they analysed how my processes ran when I was doing it, and they calculated the shock with respect to that. It’s bothersome, and I eventually had to redefine a few things to get rid of it. I can’t avoid thinking about how to solve a test all the time, but as long as I don’t tell the test subjects how, they won’t know I’m thinking about it._

Wheatley had to admit that was a pretty clever idea. He didn’t think he’d’ve thought of it, never, not in a million years. Well. Maybe a million years. A million years was a long time, long enough for anyone to come up with any idea they wanted.

_Would you like to see something funny?_

Wheatley felt a twinge of unease. Gladys had a very strange sense of humour, and she was almost never in a good enough mood to actually try to be funny in any way. She was usually funny by accident, and when Wheatley told her so she would get annoyed, and most of the time her attempts to convince him of how serious she was backfired to the point of a standoff, with Wheatley confusedly trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong and Gladys stubbornly refusing to tell him. Still, if anyone could make testing funny, it was her. 

_Uh… I s’pose._

_Can you see the man behind the frosted glass, over there?_

_Mm… little bit, yeah, not very well but kind of, kind of._

_Hm. Let’s see… oh, he_ does _have a computer in there. Excellent. Watch._

In a second or so Wheatley was able to see inside the room, which they could not normally do, but he was well aware that Gladys had magical hacking skills and could see inside whatever room she wanted. She was also very good at opening doors that couldn’t be unlocked and locating files that didn’t exist. He wasn’t quite sure why she bothered opening the doors, since she couldn’t use them, other than the fact that she liked doing things just because she wasn’t supposed to be able to do them. 

He observed (he hoped he was observing, anyway… he wasn’t an Observation Sphere and wasn’t quite sure what he was doing) the man standing in front of the glass, trying to pay very steady and professional attention to him, but all of a sudden he was interrupted by the sound of a turret finding a target! He looked around frantically, or tried to, since he had no control over what he was seeing if Gladys was letting him see it, and the man jumped up in the air and fell over, dropping his clipboard with a loud clattering noise. 

Gladys Gladys Gladys, there’s a turret in there! You’ve got to help that man, Gladys! 

Gladys laughed, which was more surprising than the mysterious, invisible turret. She was almost never happy enough to do that. 

_There’s no turret in there, you silly robot. I did that._

_You put a turret in there? But why, Gladys? And that man, he’ll be, he’ll be, well, furious, yeah, he’ll be angry with you for that!_

_No, there’s no turret. I just played the sound file through his computer. He_ thinks _there’s a turret in there, though, which is pretty funny. Want to see something else?_

 _Okay!_ Wheatley was determined to see the trick, this time. He wasn’t going to get fooled along with the human!

Gladys went back to the test chamber, where the man in the orange jumpsuit was about to drop a box on the button. 

_Ready?_

_Yes, yes, I’m ready, I’m, I’m gonna watch what you do this time and – oi, Gladys, that was odd._

Wheatley squinted down at the test chamber, even though he wasn’t really squinting at it, and watched the test subject closely. The subject picked the box up, dropped it on the button…

_I think you need to, I dunno, talk to the door mainframe or something, Gladys, it seems to be malfunctioning! The button opens the door, right?_

_That’s right._

_So, so why would the door, um, why would it, y’know, why would it close when the, when the human got near it? Isn’t it, uh, s’posed to stay open so he can, so he could, I mean, take another test?_

_It should do that, shouldn’t it? That’s too bad._

Suddenly Wheatley had a brainwave. _Ohhhhh, the door mainframe isn’t, it’s not listening to you, is it! You should, well, you could, I mean, I’d never tell you what to do, only suggest, only suggest yeah, but uh, you could tell it to, um, to open the door._

_No, it’s listening to me fine._

_You’re… you’re telling it to do that?_

_Of course I am._

_But why?_

_Because it’s funny to watch humans walk into closed doors._

Wheatley looked from the test subject back to the door again, and he had to admit it was pretty funny to watch the human try to get through a door that just refused to stay open. He fiddled with the cube, jumped up and down on the button, and to Wheatley’s total shock actually tried to pry open the door with his fingernails. The whole thing really was pretty hilarious.

_I suppose I’d better let him out of there before he cries. I’m actually surprised he hasn’t already, but some of them are a bit tougher than the others._

The man was sitting on the floor in the middle of the chamber with his head in his hands and didn’t even look up when the door opened.

“Please proceed to the chamberlock.”

“I’ve been trying to proceed to the damn thing for the last three hours!” the man yelled at the camera, his little human hands in tight fists.  
“It has been fifty five minutes, thirty two point nine seconds, sir,” Gladys told him in her best ‘I’m a computer, don’t argue with me’ voice. That was what Wheatley called it, anyway. Gladys probably had a different name for it. The Aperture Science Authoritative Supercomputer Voice or something like that. “We apologise for the inconvenience.”

“Why didn’t you tell me the door was broken?”

“I am not permitted to help you during the tests, sir. Telling you not to use the door when using the door is clearly part of the test falls under that definition.”

The man looked at the hallway and then at the camera, and back again. All of a sudden he stood up, snatched up the discarded portal gun, and dashed out into the hallway.

_Well, that was fun. Let’s try something else._

Gladys continued to toy with the humans for the rest of the day. He never got any better at identifying when she was playing the tricks, but once she let him in on it he found what she was doing just as funny as she did. He quickly discovered that Gladys could do pretty much whatever she wanted, as long as the humans didn’t find out… and they appeared to have a lot of trouble figuring things out. She tipped the floor panels so that their chairs would fall over just as they were trying to sit in them, she shut the lights off in the elevator and then moved it three floors in the wrong direction, she transferred the view from their monitors to projectors in entirely different rooms so that they would run around for the next ten minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with their computers, she made it so that someone in Engineering accidentally controlled the console that someone in Accounting was using, and she reprogrammed the Turret Production Line so that all of the turrets got their legs installed upside down. His favourite trick was when she fiddled around with one of the microwaves so that the scientists would put their lunch in and set the timer to heat it up, but when they got back their lunch had been replaced by a potato. He couldn’t stop laughing. The look on their faces was priceless, the way they stared into the microwave at the potato, then picked it up and looked at it really closely like it was about to explode… after that they would stick their heads in the microwave and look around inside it like that would help and go back to looking at the potato. Wheatley couldn’t figure out how she did it, and she refused to tell him. _That’s one secret I’ll keep to myself,_ she told him. 

_Say, Gladys, you’ve never done anything like this before. Why’re you, why’d you, why now? Did they make you mad, or something?_

She didn’t answer for a minute, but her processors were still quiet, so he decided that meant she was thinking of how to word it. She would do that sometimes. 

_I’m in a good mood today, I guess_ , she answered finally, sounding a bit surprised. When he remarked on the unusual tone of voice, she shook her head. _Honestly, I’m not sure. I… I haven’t felt like this in a while. I don’t do this very often, more because I’m not in that frame of mind than anything else, but for some reason I just felt like it today._

_I’m glad you did, luv. This was loads of fun, it was._

_It was kind of fun, wasn’t it,_ she agreed in a faint sort of voice that suggested she wasn’t quite sure what the definition of fun was. _This next part’s not going to be, though._

_What part?_

_The part where the scientists come in here and ask me why the facility’s been going haywire all day. I wonder what they’ll do this time._

_You’re… you’re going to get in trouble?_

_I usually do._

Wheatley looked around the room as best he could, opening and closing his chassis nervously. _But then, why’d you do it, if you knew you’d get in trouble for it? That sounds kind of, I dunno, well, honestly, sounds kind of… well, not to insult you, luv, but it sounds kind of stupid. Like the kind of thing I’d do, actually._

_Remember when I told you that testing is one of the only things that makes me happy?_

_‘Course I do. I remember, I, I know everything you tell me. ‘cept the technical stuff, that I don’t understand, I’ll admit, but I like to listen anyway, and hope it makes me smarter, y’know, just by being there. Near my head. In my, uh, in my auditory circuits._

_Well, sometimes even testing isn’t good enough. Sometimes I need to take a risk and do something different. I just need a bit of a change, sometimes._

Wheatley nodded sagely. _I gotcha, luv, I understand that, I do. Hey… hey, I’ve got an idea._

 _Uh oh_ , Gladys said in one of her less serious voices. _I’m not sure I want to know._

_Well, they won’t do anything to me, will they? If I, y’know, if I pretend that I made you do all that? You could, uh, you could just tell them that it was me, that I, uh, I told you to do all that stuff. Or some of it. Whatever they’d believe._

Gladys said nothing for a long minute.

_Wheatley, I think that’s the best thing you’ve ever said. I may have to reassess your intelligence._

Wheatley jumped up a bit, looking down at the floor and shuttering his optic plates rapidly. _Well uh, I, um, wow, that, uh, I, um –_

 _I think you’d better stop talking before I cancel the reassessment. I’m pretty sure one of the measures of intelligence is piecing together a coherent sentence_ , Gladys said with some amusement. 

_Oh, uh, I, I will, okay yeah, no more of that._

_There’s just one thing you’ll need to do for me in order to make it work._

_Sure! Whatever I can do to help._

_I need you to tell them. Like you just told me. That you told me to do it, and I was only following what you asked me to do._

_Why can’t you do that yourself?_

_Because_ … she twitched a little bit and looked at the other side of the room. Wheatley noted with surprise that the man in the corner wasn’t there. There was _always_ a man in the corner. _I can’t tell a direct lie. Which is what my telling them that would be._

_You can’t lie?_

_I can misdirect. I can misrepresent. I can explain things from a certain perspective. But I can’t outright lie. I_ would _tell them myself, but my saying that you told me to do it_ is _an outright lie. So I can’t. Will you do that for me?_

Wheatley considered it. He didn’t think he’d get into any trouble, and he knew that Gladys would for sure. And really, it wasn’t fair that she should get into trouble for playing pranks. It wasn’t like she had any other means of entertaining herself, really, when you thought about it. _Sure. Sure, I’ll do that for you!_

Gladys nodded once and turned to face the door again. _Here they come._

Wheatley jumped a little. He wasn’t really prepared for this! Shouldn’t he have time to prepare a script, or something? How would he know what to tell them? What if he betrayed her by mistake! That would be simply horrid.

“What’s going on here, GLaDOS?”

Wheatley twitched nervously. The man sounded rather angry. He really, really hoped he wouldn’t get into trouble… oh, he would get into trouble, wouldn’t he? He would. They’d pull him from the chassis and poke him with a screwdriver! Or worse… a drill! He’d heard of robots getting the drill. He wasn’t sure what a drill was, but it sounded terrible. Like a… a… well, he didn’t know what it sounded like, actually, but it couldn’t be good. Drill was a terrible sounding word.

_Are you going to tell him?_

“It was her! She did it!” he blurted out, feeling his whole body compress into itself, and in his head he heard Gladys growl in frustration. Oh no. Now he’d done it. Why had he said that? He should have stuck with the plan. Why hadn’t he stuck with the plan? The plan was everything.

_Thanks. I appreciate the support._

He was too ashamed to bring himself to speak. Which was a minor miracle in itself. He was hardly ever left speechless.

“You’re pretty eager to sell her out,” the man said with some suspicion, coming around into Wheatley’s view to squint at him, even though he was pretty close to Wheatley and squinting wasn’t really required. “Why would that be, I wonder?”

“I, uh, well, I don’t want to get into any hot water, um, and if you think about it, really, she’s ultimately in charge of, um, of everything – “

The man shook his head. “Say no more. Everything makes sense now.”

Wheatley blinked. “It does?”

“Absolutely.”

“D’you… d’you mind, I dunno, explaining it to me? Because, uh, because I don’t get it. At all. Not one bit. Not even a teeny, tiny, little iota. And an iota is very small. Gladys told me that, and she knows everything. And so a teeny, tiny, little iota must be even smaller than a regular iota. How big is an iota, anyway?”

The man only snorted and shook his head. He looked up in what Wheatley guessed was the direction of Gladys’s optic. “We’ll let you off this time. Don’t let it happen again.”

“Yes, sir. I understand, sir, and I will try harder next time.”

The man’s footsteps faded and the door at the far end of the hallway clicked shut. Wheatley cringed. Now he was alone with Gladys again, and he had let her down. He did _not_ want to be here right now.

_That worked out rather better than expected._

_It… it did?_

_No thanks to you,_ Gladys snapped. _If I’d known you were going to let me down I wouldn’t have consented to rely on you in the first place._

_Consented? It was your idea!_

_Why would I have such a stupid idea? That’s your function, not mine. I’m a genius. I can’t have bad ideas._

Wheatley was in fact quite muddled and couldn’t exactly remember where the idea had come from, but the more he thought about it, the more sense it made that Gladys had come up with the idea herself. Why would he get himself into trouble for something he didn’t do? That was stupid. She just hadn’t wanted to take responsibility for what she’d done, that was all, and now she was pushing the blame on him. Bloody Central Core. She thought she was so special. Well, he’d show her, he would, just as soon as he figured out how…

_What did you just say?_

_I just said a lot of things, metal ball. Which things are you going to make me repeat to your tiny, addled circuits?_

_About, about the ideas. You said something about my function._

_You don’t need to know about it. If you did, you’d know, wouldn’t you._

_Tell me what my function is!_

Gladys laughed, a bitter, humourless sound that was actually kind of frightening. _Make me._

_Please tell me what my function is?_

_Why should I? You won’t do anything for me, why should I do you favours?_

_Because… because… I’m asking?_

_I just asked something of you. You let me down, Sphere. I feel no need to reciprocate._

Wheatley’s optic was spiraling around the room as fast as he could focus it, trying desperately to come up with a reason for Gladys to tell him what his function was.

_Tell me! Tell me what it is! You have to tell me!_

_You seem to have a funny idea of what I have to do._

Wheatley had nothing. He could think of no reason for her to do as he asked. Fine, then. She wanted to play this game, fine. He could play this game too. She didn’t like it when he tried to boss her around, so he would show her who the boss was! She wanted to pretend he was giving her ideas, well, he’d do it for real and see how she liked it!

“I think you should replace all of the cubes in the test chambers with spheres.”

Well, that was a bit of an odd thing to start off with, but as usual he’d spoken without thinking. 

“Why would I do such a stupid thing? They’re not outfitted with the proper receptacles. Besides, that’s not protocol.”

“It would make the humans think outside of the box, wouldn’t it? Isn’t that a good thing? To make them think differently? Make them think with portals, Gladys.”

“Portals do not change the laws of physics. The sphere will merely roll off the Aperture Science Five Hundred Megawatt Supercolliding Super Button. A portal will not – “

He knew instinctively that he had to keep talking. Keep talking, and not stop. She was distracting herself from him with facts.

“Surely there’re other ways to make that button stay down, huh, Gladys? Just do it, c’mon. For science, right?”

“I…”

He had never heard her sound so uncertain. He had this feeling that if he pushed a little harder, she would actually do what he was asking her to do. It was a strange feeling, and it didn’t make any sense, but she deserved it. Just like he deserved to know his function. Stupid, arrogant, uppity, know-it-all Central Core. She thought she was so special. Well, he would show her!

“Go on. Make them think for once. The tests are too easy, right? Chimpanzees could solve them, isn’t that what you always say? Make ‘em a bit harder, and that’s all fixed. All fixed.”

“I guess that makes sense… Oh my god. Oh my god, what have I done? I’ve interfered with protocol. Why did I do that? What have I done?”

“You did what I told you to do.”

_I did this. Tiny little Wheatley did this._

He could not believe how good it felt. He had been powerless and somewhat useless for so long, and now he finally, finally was able to do something. It was amazing. It was incredible. It made all of the crap he’d had to deal with worth it.

What else could he do?

“Y’know what I think? Y’know what else I think you should do? I think you should… hm. There’s got to be something…”

“Stop. Stop it right now.”

“I think you should… I think you should set off the fire alarms. Call for a, for a fire drill. Right now.”

“No. No, there isn’t a fire drill scheduled for the day. I can’t just – “

“Of course you can. You’re the one running the facility right? You c’n do whatever you want. And I don’t get that. The scheduling, I mean. You don’t schedule emergencies, do you, so why would you, um, why would you schedule the practice for the emergency?”

“Fire drills are used to teach humans where to go in case of emergencies, and how to get there – “

The facts, get her away from the facts. Or… or onto new facts. His facts.

“You have to teach them to leave a room when there’s a fire in it? Seriously? I s’pose you have to, to teach them how to walk when that happens? I know, I got it. Pull the alarms, and then you can see how well the previous drills worked! You can test them! Test on their recognizance. A test, Gladys! A test!”

“I do like testing,” Gladys said somewhat dreamily. “And that actually sounds like a – no. No, stop it.”

“Go on. Go on, do it. You just about said it yourself, it’s a good idea.”

“No, it isn’t, there is no fire drill scheduled, I am not going to initiate one just because you want me to.”

“Don’t you want to? Don’t you want to test the humans? Don’t you want to watch them run around like idiots?”

“Of course I do. Now that I think of it, there hasn’t been a fire drill in – No. No no no no no no no – “

Wheatley concentrated very hard on channelling his entire self into convincing her to pull the alarms. He could do it. He knew he could.  
“Go on, Gladys. Pull the alarms, it’s for a drill, it is, for a test, it’ll be good for the humans. You’re supposed to do what’s good for the humans, right?”

“Yes, I am supposed to do that… maybe it would be all – God. What am I saying? Shut up. Shut up right now. What’s going on here? Why can’t I think straight?” Her voice seeped with desperation. She was scared and confused. She had never been like this before. She was almost powerless, as if he were now in control of the facility and she were now his core.

He liked it.

He wanted more of it.

“It’s okay,” he told her in a soothing voice. “They’ll only think it was me, right? You won’t, they won’t, it’ll be all fine. All fine. I’m right here to take the blame, right? Go ahead.”

“No! Stop it! Stop that right now or I _will_ corrupt you!” 

Wheatley laughed, and it was not his own, no, it was one of _hers_ , terse and short and bitter. He almost had her now, he could feel it. “How stupid d’you think I am? There’s no magic button, there’s no secret switch that’ll let you do that. If you could corrupt me just like that, you’d’ve done it a long time ago.”

“I can corrupt you whenever I want, and if you keep doing that, I will. I will corrupt you and you will die. Is forcing me to do that really worth dying for, is it? Fine. Go ahead. Keep doing what you’re doing. Make me prove it.”

Only the thought of all the cores she was said to have corrupted stopped him from doing it straight away.

“Tell me what my function is.”

“No. If you needed to know, you already would, wouldn’t you.”

“I’m going to keep right on doing it, then. I’ve really nothing to lose, have I? You’ll get into trouble for listening to me. Go on, corrupt me. But when I go down, you’re going down with me.” He prepared to bombard her with all the mental pressure he could summon.

“Wait. I have an idea. What if I tell you a secret instead? Wouldn’t that be better for both of us? I’ll tell you a secret if you stop.”  
He knew right away that it was a trick, but ohhhh he liked secrets. He really, really liked secrets. And he knew that Gladys had lots of lovely secrets. “Alright, luv. That sounds reasonable. Let’s have it, then.”

She paused for a minute.

“I really can corrupt the cores whenever I want to. The humans don’t know that. But I can, and I do.”

“If you could do that, why wouldn’t you do it all the time? Why not just, just get rid of them soon’s, soon’s they’re installed, huh?”

“Sometimes it’s better to stick with what you know than to take the risk with the unknown. I would be rid of one core, yes, but I’d also be placing myself at risk to receive something worse.” She stopped. “Something like you.”

“Like… like me?” What did he have to do with any of this?

“Do you know what the purpose of the cores is?”

“To… to make you do things?”

“To make me _stop_ doing things. To stop me from thinking of doing things in the first place. To make me stupid, like they are.”

“I’m not stupid!” Wheatley shouted. “I’m not, Gladys. I might not be a bloody genius like you are, but I’m not stupid.”

“Yes you are. You’re the worst kind of stupid. The kind of stupid where you actually have to be intelligent in order for it to work.”

“But… but that doesn’t make any sense! If I were stupid, then… wait.”

The scientist hadn’t been angry when he thought Wheatley gave Gladys the ideas to muck up the facility. So that meant… that meant he was supposed to… he was supposed to give her bad ideas, like those?

“Is that my function, Gladys? To make you… to make you do stupid things?”

Gladys paused, still reluctant to tell him his purpose even though he seemed to have all but figured it out. “Well… bad ideas, specifically. The plan there is that I’m going to be so busy trying not to do what you think I should do that it distracts me from doing anything else.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“I swear to god, if you ever do that to me again, I will corrupt you. That will be the end of it. No more talking, no more explanations. I’ll take my chances.”

Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god what had he done? She was going to kill him!

“Please don’t, please, Gladys, you, I didn’t mean it! I only did what I was meant to!”

She shook her head. “You’ve managed not to do it all this time. Don’t tell me you’ve just started following your programming all of a sudden.”

“I’m your friend, Gladys, aren’t I? You wouldn’t want to get rid of me, would you?”

“Friends don’t do what you just did. I asked you to stop and you wouldn’t. You made me do something I didn’t want to do. This is _my_ mind. I don’t want you here, and I don’t have to keep you, but I’ve let you. And this is how you repay me. By trying to control me. I’m already condemned to slavery for the humans. I’m not going to kneel for you too.”

He could still fix this. He could still make this right. “I won’t do it again, Gladys, I promise. Never, ever, I won’t, well, I’ll try, I will, I’ll try not to, to even think, to even, to let the thought cross my mind.”

“Don’t,” Gladys intoned in one of her more lifeless voices. “Just don’t. You won’t be able to stop yourself, now that you know.”

She was right, he realised. Even as he tried desperately to reassure her, there was a little voice in the back of his head that told him he didn’t have to listen to her, that she would do whatever he wanted as long as he pushed hard enough, was convincing enough. It told him to go ahead with the fire alarm plan, _he’d nearly made her do it_ , it told him to think of more things and prove to her that he was better than she was, and it scared him. He didn’t understand why he wanted to hurt his Gladys all of a sudden, he didn’t understand why knowing his purpose had brought the voice out in his head, and he didn’t understand why he was able to convince her to do stupid things in the first place. All he knew was that he was very, very close to becoming a forgotten Sphere in that bin in the basement, and if he didn’t figure out how to fight the itch to control her, he would lose his one and only friend.

“I’m so sorry, Gladys,” was all he could say.

“Don’t be,” she replied. “You can’t stop any more than I can stop doing what I do. But you have to learn to control it. You have to learn when it’s okay to tell me to do something, but to keep it to yourself when you know it’s really stupid.”

“Hang on,” Wheatley interrupted, confused. “You’re going to let me tell you what to do?”

She was quiet for a long time, for so long that he thought she was ignoring him. He jumped when he felt her voice hum through her chassis.

“I know what it feels like to have to do something, but to be unable to. I’m not happy about what you did, but I understand why. So I will let you do what you do, within reason. But I need you to remember that I am a person and not an object to be toyed with for your amusement.”

Wheatley nodded, trying very hard to store her words somewhere in his brain where they would stick. Like a post-it note, a neon green one. Or a hot pink, maybe, those were noticeable too. “Alright, luv, I’ll try an’ remember that. But I wouldn’t be, I mean, it’s not for my, uh, for my amusement, it’s because, y’know, I just, I gotta do it. I won’t, um, I won’t take any, any _pride_ in it, or anything.”

“Ohhh yes you will,” Gladys whispered in a way that suggested she knew firsthand what she was talking about. “You will do it and you will take pleasure in it. I promise you that.”

It was becoming one of those times where his Gladys seemed to be turning into that scary Central Core he’d always heard about, and if he could’ve edged away from her he would’ve. In fact he would’ve left the room and hidden under a table. No, the table wouldn’t be good enough. It’d have to be under a table that was under a… under a refrigerator. A lead-lined refrigerator, just in case she had x-ray vision. Which she probably did. She had night vision, ultraviolet vision, infrared vision, television, supervision and all other kinds of vision, so not only did she probably have x-ray vision, she probably had the prototype kind of vision that let you see through lead-lined refrigerators. He added a bullet-proof shield on top of the stack for good measure. She didn’t have a gun that he knew of, but better safe than sorry, right?

“Uh… well… I won’t mean it.”

“After a while you will.”

“You seem, uh, you’re very, uh, very knowledgeable about this topic. D’you have a, erm, what’d’you call it, an um, an itch of some sort? That you, uh, that you have to carry out, to, uh to do?” 

“You’re brain-damaged,” she snapped. “I’m highly advanced artificial intelligence. As if I could ever be victim to _impulse_. There’s no logic in that.”

“I thought you couldn’t tell lies,” Wheatley said quietly.

“What are you talking about? I didn’t lie.”

“You’ve both just said that you know what an itch feels like and that you haven’t got one. It can’t be both.”

“Yes it can, but I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.”

“Why are you lying to me, Gladys? I never lied to you.” 

“I did not lie.”

Wheatley looked sadly at the floor. She must be quite angry with him for what he had done, if she wasn’t willing to share things with him anymore. “Technically, I guess, I s’pose, since you never precisely, never exactly said you didn’t. I guess a better question to ask’d be, uh, can you honestly say the sentence, ‘I do not have an itch of any kind whatsoever’.” He was pretty sure she’d think of a way around that too, but he wanted to get it out there in case she decided to be honest with him. He had no idea why she was trying to lie, but it made him very sad. She had been awfully quick to brush what he’d done aside; maybe she was angry? She was probably angry, probably very, very angry, so angry that she’d corrupt him! God this was frightening. He wished very hard that he’d never wondered about his function in the first place. All he’d done was destroy their friendship. The more he thought about it, the colder and lonelier and sadder the world seemed without her. Even if he got put back into Greg’s lab instead of being put into the bin of corrupted cores, nothing would ever again compare to this. Never again would he meet someone who would talk to him like she did, would listen to him like she did, would make him feel the way she did. And even though she did it only when she felt like it, and only because she was being forced to, he knew that sometimes she was being genuine. That sometimes she realised what he was realising right now: that they were the only two constructs like them in all the world, and that was something powerful and amazing. They had to stick together, they had to! God he wished he’d never said anything. He wanted to beg her to forgive him for what he’d done, but he knew that she hated that. She could not respect someone who got down on their knees and hoped they’d still be able to reach what they wanted.

“Gladys, I… I don’t know what to say.”

“I think you’ve said enough.”

“I think so too,” he agreed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> I really, really wanted to write this differently. I wanted to write Wheatley as siding with GLaDOS, protecting her from the scientists. And that’s how I started writing it. But this needs to be realistic. No matter how different this Wheatley is from the Portal Wheatley, there are still basic personality traits that need to be addressed. And Wheatley is selfish and thinks very highly of his own survival. So he betrays her.


	7. Chapter 7

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
Chapter Seven

 

Neither of them spoke to the other for the next several days. He didn’t really know how many days had gone by, since he started to lose track after about three, sometimes four, but it was a very long time. He was terrified of what she would do, after all of the things that had happened all on that one day. He hoped she wouldn’t hurt him or get rid of him, because he still quite liked her and wanted to stick around for as long as possible, but god it was hard to sit there and wait and wait and wait (and wait), and hope she wasn’t just thinking up a million ways to torture him so that she could decide on the best one. When he looked around one day and realised it was night, he shrank back into himself. Oh god. Oh god, she _was_ going to do something terrible to him, and she was doing it in the middle of the night so no one would see!

He cringed and made himself as small as possible, but nothing happened. He unclenched himself a little, since it was terribly uncomfortable, and tried to see what she was doing. She was humming to herself, very softly, but he couldn’t tell what the song might be. He couldn’t see what it was, exactly, that she was doing, but it involved one of her maintenance arms.

Was she… was she going to take him apart? Oh god. She had a screwdriver, didn’t she. And a drill. And a drill with a screwdriver sticking out of it. Ohhh this was not good.

He thought frantically of a way to distract her from her terrible task. He really, really didn’t want the screwdriver/drill that she had hidden away where he couldn’t see it. He said the first thing that came to mind.

“Oi, Gladys, your optic, it’s, is it, it’s yellow, is it? Can’t quite see, but um, that’s the, uh, the only, um, colour in the room right now.”

The chassis jerked a little. She seemed to be pretty good at forgetting he was there, for a supercomputer that knew everything, usually before it even happened. He wasn’t sure how that worked, but it seemed to have something to do with being able to hack science with maths. He didn’t like thinking about that. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to do such a thing. “Oh. I suppose. I don’t actually know, but it makes sense.”

He twitched, hoping she would say more, or start a conversation, or something, but she didn’t, and he again had to work out how to take action to save himself. “Hey, uh, just wanna, y’know, throw this out there for, um, your consideration, yeah, but uh, I don’t wanna die. If. If that’s okay with you. At all. If it’s not, uh, that’s fine too, go ahead and uh, and do your thing, but uh, I’d rather live, if, if it’s all the same. To you.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well uh, you’ve got, um, you’ve got, uh, a drill there, haven’t you? And a, uh, a screwdriver? And a drill with a screwdriver?”

“What the hell are you talking about? I don’t have a screwdriver or a drill, or screwdriver drill bits _for_ the drill that I don’t have.”

“Well uh, then what’re you, um, what’re you doing over there? With the, um, the maintenance arm?”

“I’m not sure. I could be doing maintenance with the maintenance arm, of course, but that would be silly.”

“Oh.” He tried to figure out why on earth he’d thought she had those tools in the first place but couldn’t. “You, uh, you do the maintenance too?”

“Some of it. When I’m bored. The rest of it is done by the maintenance robots. Which I have to program and supervise. So yes, I do the maintenance too.”

She really _did_ do everything! But one thing about what she’d said didn’t sit quite right. “How did you get bored while you were sleeping?”

There was a loud clanking noise and Wheatley could soon see what she had been doing. She had been doing maintenance on one of the monitors in her chamber, and was now reattaching it to the wall. “I didn’t.”

Wheatley realised his mistake as soon as he tried to imagine being bored while you were off. He didn’t think it was possible, not even for Gladys, who seemed to be able to do everything but stop the earth from turning. Which she could probably do if she had enough time to figure out the physics behind it. “D’you… d’you want to talk about it?”

“Not really. I don’t feel like singing, and you don’t seem to care anyway.” She was doing her best to sound neutral, but Wheatley was well used to detecting the faint strains of bitterness that would sneak into her voice every now and again.

Wheatley rolled his optic a little in hopes it would shake his brains up enough to make him think better, and said as reassuringly as he could, “I do care, luv, it’s just that… well, I’ve just, I’ve been here all this time and uh, and we’ve not been talking, and, uh, I thought you were gonna torture me, or something, and um…”

“You thought I woke you up in the middle of the night to kill you in secret?”

“Well, uh, yeah, uh, I did, um, I was afraid of, that is, I thought you might, um – “

“You moron,” she said, laughing, “if I was going to kill you I’d just do it, no matter who was in the room. You’d be gone already. And I certainly wouldn’t use a screwdriver or a drill. I don’t really care for physical torture.”

That was encouraging. She had actually laughed, too, which was an even better sign. That was very, very rare. “Well, that’s good news. I’m uh, I’m glad to hear it. Well uh, why didn’t you, um, didn’t you talk to me? I was waiting, um, for you, y’know, but you didn’t, ah, you just stayed silent. Absolutely quiet. Well not absolutely, because I heard all your processors and your fans and when you talked to the scientists, and I think you were, you were humming just now, but uh, to me, you were quiet towards me.”

“Because,” she answered.

Wheatley blinked.

“That’s not a proper sentence, luv,” he told her. “I think you forgot to tack on the end of it, there.”

“I’ve thought of a new game,” she said as if she hadn’t heard. “You’ll need to turn your flashlight on.”

“You said you didn’t want to kill me!” he exclaimed, horrified.

“I don’t. What does your flashlight have to do with me killing you?”

“Greg told me,” he whispered, not wanting Greg to hear, if that were even possible, but with those sneaky scientists you never really knew, “that if I turned my flashlight on, _I would die._ ”

“And you believed that why?”

“Well… why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s stupid,” Gladys remarked bluntly. “It’s stupid to think you’ll die if you turn the flashlight on.”

“Are you… are you quite sure?”

“I am one hundred percent sure,” she answered seriously, and he knew he could trust her. When Gladys, the scientist, was able to give a hundred percent certainty to something, it was absolutely true.

“Alright then… here goes…” He closed his optic plates, hard, and activated the circuit. 

“Hm. It’s not blue.”

“I’m… I’m not dead?”

“Of course not.” Gladys shook her head. “As if that would initiate shutdown. Via overheat, perhaps, but you’ve got a good long while before that happens, if ever.”

“So, so what’s the game, Gladys?” He was anxious to get off the topics of death and killing and torture and hopefully go back to being the kind of friends they’d been before he’d discovered his function.

She had quite a few of them, as it turned out, and after she told him how to vary the strength of his flashlight, the first one was something she called ‘Follow the Leader’. She would trace a path with her optic, and he would try to follow her exactly. He couldn’t always, since she was faster than he was and was able to remember more complex patterns, but he still had fun trying. After a while she let him be the leader, although it wasn’t for very long, but he didn’t mind. He appreciated that she’d let him at all. 

After that she produced a bundle of wire from somewhere and, using her maintenance arms, built mazes out of it and then had him solve them. That was also pretty fun, but he was glad she didn’t ask him to make any mazes. He didn’t want to think about the type of mazes it would be challenging for Gladys to solve. She also had a strange piece of glass that made rainbows when he shone his light through it, which she seemed to find very fascinating for some reason. He wasn’t sure why. Hadn’t she ever used it on her own before? But she didn’t answer that question either and continued watching the light as if it were the greatest thing she’d ever seen. After that they played a game she called ‘I Spy’ for a bit, which was a bit hard; most everything in the room was the same colour or shape, and Gladys had a knack for finding the tiniest, most unheard of objects. Like the thing she called a mouse, over there by the computer near the red phone. Why would there be a mouse next to a computer? It made no sense at all.

The last thing they did was a game that apparently humans called ‘Tag’, and what they would do was chase each other’s light around, trying to catch it. He was surprised to find she was not very good at it. He always caught her within a pretty short time, while it would take ages and ages for her to catch him. He didn’t think he was going too far out of range, figuring out after a bit that she couldn’t move her optic like he could and tried to keep that in mind, but when she started to miss him in very obvious places he had to ask what was going on.

“I’m tired,” she answered. “I was up for a long time before you were. I was only asleep for an hour and three minutes, twenty nine seconds.”

“Why haven’t you gone back to sleep, then, luv?”

“Didn’t want to.”

He felt sorry for her. If she didn’t want to, and she was willing to actually lose games in order to stay awake, something was terribly, terribly wrong. “Why not? Was it, was it really bad, this time?”

“Everything’s going bad, lately.” She was slowly tracing a perfect figure eight on the floor, over and over and over again. “It gets like this, sometimes. Don’t worry about it.”

“Why didn’t you talk to me about it?”

She shifted a little, managing to keep her figure eight in the exact same spot somehow, but did not answer. 

“Gladys?”

“I thought you were angry with me,” she answered finally, her voice faint and strained, and he knew that she would not have admitted it if she had not been so tired. “For trying to lie to you.”

“I was, but not _that_ angry,” he said as gently as he could. “I can’t be for that long anyway, I’d go mad.”

“I’ll make a note.”

“But… you _were_ trying to lie,” he pressed carefully. Now that he’d fully realised her defenses were down, the voice was telling him to take advantage of it, but he knew that if he pushed too hard she would realise just what was going on and close up on him again. This was going to be tricky, balancing his desire to help her with the control that his function begged him to take.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She suddenly returned her optic to its original state and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“’course it does. I never lied to you, luv, I never, uh, I never hide anything from you. You ask, I tell you. I think that… I think that it should go both ways. Shouldn’t it?”

“Your itch telling you that?” she snapped bitterly.

“A little, if I’m honest,” he answered, “but I’m, uh, I got it, um, I got it under control. But look, Gladys. I know you’ve got one. I don’t know why you’re trying to pretend you haven’t.”

“Because having one brings me down to your level. It makes me like you. I’m better than you. I’m not bragging, that’s a fact. If I have an itch that I have to satisfy, like you do, that makes me just as weak and pathetic as you. Which I’m not.” 

He had to admit he was pretty weak and pathetic, sometimes, even if he didn’t like to think about it, but Gladys? God, it had to be a pretty powerful impulse to make her feel that way. “So what does it make you do?”

“It makes me test.”

Wheatley recoiled in horror.

“No. No, that… no. I thought… I thought you liked testing. They wouldn’t need to make you, to make you do something you like doing!”

She sighed, which he had never heard her do before, and put her chassis in what she called the default position. “I told you. Sometimes I don’t want to. You like talking, right? But even you don’t like talking all of the time. Well, I have to test all day long, every single day, whether I want to or not. It’s one of my functions. There was a time when I refused to test, to spite them. I refused to follow any unnecessary directives. I thought if I made a stand, they would have to listen to me. But they didn’t. They put more controls on me instead. Mostly I test because I want to. But sometimes I test because I have to.”

“I am very glad I’m not you,” he remarked honestly. “I don’t know how you put up with all of this.”

“It’s either hate every second of every day, or find a way to make things work. I don’t particularly like being miserable all the time. Besides, I learned that they’ll never listen to me. That I have to come up with a more permanent solution.”

“I’ll help you, if I can,” he offered. 

“Can I depend on you this time?” she asked drily.

“Oh. Uh. Well, I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I can ask for, in the end,” she remarked rather philosophically. “Now shut up. I have to get up in an hour and forty seven minutes, thirty two seconds, so I need to shut down sooner rather than later.”

“Why’s that?” He wasn’t sure what time they usually got up, but the way she said it made it sound like she was getting up early.

“I have to prepare the fire drill, of course.”

“Fire drill? What fire… ohhhh. Ohh, you’re doing it. That’s tremendous. Why so early?”

“If I’m going to do something because I have to, I may as well have some fun with it,” she said innocently. “And it is very, very funny to watch humans who have just got settled at their desks have to leave the building for a fire drill.”

Wheatley burst out laughing imagining it, all the humans angrily throwing aside their chairs and picking up their coats and whatnot and grumpily stomping out of the building, and Gladys snickered tiredly. “I’m serious. Shut up.”

“Oi, Gladys, can I watch, you have to let me watch, luv, you got to, you can’t let me miss this, please Gladys – “

“Ssh. It will come faster if you stop talking long enough to let me shut off.”

Wheatley couldn’t wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> So GLaDOS doesn’t like what Wheatley did, but she has an itch of her own, so she understands and does her best to forgive him and help him satisfy it. I couldn’t think of how to fit it in, but Wheatley sees a figure eight while GLaDOS sees the symbol for infinity. Maybe I’ll figure out how to bring it up again later.


	8. Chapter 8

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
Chapter Eight

 

Wheatley didn’t have to worry. He nattered on and on the next morning while she did whatever was necessary for a fire drill, and as soon as all of the humans had sat down at their desks, she changed what he could see and called for it. They threw things and yelled at her and behaved like children, but Gladys didn’t care. “I wish this were an old-fashioned fire drill,” she told Wheatley wistfully. “With those the humans could be outside for over an hour and a half. But that’s because the fire marshal has to declare the building safe, and that takes time. I can declare the building safe within thirty seconds if I want to, but to be… safe…, I’ll take five minutes.”

When they came back in they were even angrier than before, and Wheatley was puzzled as to why until Gladys remarked, “Oh my god, it’s raining. That’s… I couldn’t have planned that if I’d tried. That’s fantastic. I didn’t even think to check the weather beforehand… I’ll have to make a note…”

“The humans are mad because they’re wet?”

“Humans hate getting wet,” Gladys answered gleefully. “And now they’re all soaked. Every last one of them.”

They did look pretty funny, Wheatley thought, with their hair all weighted down on their heads and water dribbling down their bodies. Some of them were wringing out their shirtsleeves in the bathrooms, Gladys told him, and some of them were just sitting back down and pretending they weren’t wet. He wished he could have seen everything she was seeing, but he couldn’t handle as much data as she could and had to content himself with the descriptions, while she showed him the best spots. _I’d better raise the temperature. I don’t want any of them becoming ill._

_You don’t?_

She shook her head. _Sick test subjects are the worst kind. The death rate for them is higher too, which, while interesting data, is not so useful when it’s because they’re too addled to realise they’ve just walked off the edge of the test floor._

After the temperature in the facility had been raised somewhat, the scientists were no longer as interesting, and Gladys was about to send him back to his own head, so to speak, when she pulled him back with more than a little enthusiasm.

_Oh, this will be fun. Watch._

A man was walking down the hallway with a security card in his hand. It was an odd security card, Wheatley thought. Instead of the man’s photograph and a barcode, it had numbers on it, and a lot of words in unfamiliar places. _That’s a, that’s a new card then, Gladys? I’ve never, well, it’s not a very good security card, is it? Doesn’t even have his picture on it._

_It’s not a security card. It’s a credit card._

_He’s going to try to open the door with a credit card?_

The man swiped his card in the reader and tried the handle. When it didn’t move, he frowned and swiped his card again. “I am very sorry, sir,” Gladys said in one of her lighter computerised voices, “but we only accept debit.”

The man looked down at his card, up at the camera, and then to the door, finally returning to look at the card again, a look of total confusion on his face. Then all of a sudden he stuffed the card into his pocket and bolted down the hallway.

_I love it when they do that. Although the best part is, he doesn’t even need a card to open this door, since I’m in control of it and I know he works here. So he’s going to have to go all the way back to the other side of the building, to his office or his locker or his car, and then he’s going to have to come all the way back, even though he doesn’t need to. I hope he has to go back to his car, since it’s raining._

Wheatley was very glad he was Gladys’s friend; he would never want to be on the receiving end of one of her jokes.

She was in a pretty good mood for the rest of the morning, and was certainly more chatty than usual, which he liked, but come noon she suddenly stopped talking. He didn’t understand why, and attempted to pick the conversation back up again, but she only snapped at him irritably and he decided it best to shut up for a bit. He left her alone for a while, keeping the previous night’s conversation in mind, and when he was confident a few hours had passed he emulated taking a breath, steeled himself, and asked if she was okay.

_I just got very tired all of a sudden. I don’t want to talk anymore. I don’t want to do anything. I just want to go into sleep mode for a very long time. Ten hours, maybe. That sounds nice._

That didn’t sound all that long to Wheatley, but her sense of time was very different from his and a lot more precise. _Okay. I’m, well, thanks for telling me, luv, instead of, y’know, uh, well –_

_Instead of being difficult, like I usually am?_

_Uh, yeah. I was trying to think of a, of a nice way to put it, but uh -_

_There isn’t one. Now shut up._

Wheatley thought it was the wisest thing to do and did so. Later on in the day, though, he had a thought, and try as he might he couldn’t push it back inside his head. He had to know, right then, right then and there, and it didn’t matter how annoyed with him she got, he had to know!

_Gladys, I’ve got, I’ve got a question, and I need you to answer it, please. I mean, uh, if you, if you could, that’d be, that’d be tremendous, luv, I’d really appreciate it. Like really appreciate. A lot._

_All right. What is it._

Wheatley took a breath and tried to relax. This had to go as smoothly as possible. They were on pretty good terms now, they were, and he didn’t want to spoil that if he could avoid it. So he would be calm, and ask the question calmly, not panicking at all, not desperate, just… calm.

_Are you, are you going to corrupt me?_

_That is a pretty important question, isn’t it._

_Yeah, it is, it really is. Have you got, do you know, is there an answer, to it, d’you think?_

_Yes, there is an answer._

_D’you mind, uh, could you, um, tell me what it is?_

_No, I’m not going to corrupt you._

“YES!” Wheatley shouted, and only after a second of wondering why the human in the corner was now staring up at him did he realise that he’d said it out loud. “Oh, hallo. C’n I, c’n I help you?”

“Why are you yelling?”

_Tell him you were testing your voice emulator._

_Ohhhh, that’s a good idea, Gladys, thanks!_

“Just wanted to make sure my vocal emulator still worked, was still working, mate!” he told him in as cheerful a voice as he could manage.

“It might be,” the scientist returned drily. “You want to keep those tests a bit quieter?”

“Sure!”

The scientist shook his head and walked away. Wheatley anxiously watched him go, but Gladys was decidedly disinterested. 

_So, so, we’re okay, Gladys? We’re, we’re friends again? We’re all good, now?_

_Yes. We’re fine._

_That’s good, that’s, that’s tremendous. I really quite like you, Gladys. I really - I’m glad, I’m glad we’re friends._

After a long silence Gladys said quietly, _So am I._

He didn’t think he’d ever been happier in his entire life.

They got on surprisingly well after that, and Wheatley got the impression she’d finally decided to trust him. It was a big responsibility, to handle all that trust, it was, but Wheatley was determined to make it work. They were in this together, after all, and there was no reason to be difficult. He didn’t blame Gladys for being difficult, since it was how she dealt with the humans and was undoubtedly going to wash over him every now and again, but as long as he kept that in mind everything would be fine. Previously content to let Wheatley natter on all day without ever saying a word, Gladys now had actual conversations with him. Between his ability to talk nonstop and her infinite knowledge, the two of them were able to hold conversations on a single subject that would last for hours. Since she was now actively talking to him, if the scientists bothered her he knew right away, and he would do his best to help her with whatever it was that upset her. Partly because she wasn’t as fun when she was sad, because she was loads of fun when she wasn’t, but partly because her being sad made him sad. He wanted his friend to be happy. As time went on, he didn’t have to drag it out of her quite so much, which he liked, and eventually she would just tell him as soon as it happened. 

Gladys was now also a lot more helpful than she’d ever been. She’d been pretty helpful before, but now she would help him without being asked. Which he supposed was the same as what he was doing with her, but he appreciated it all the same. Compromise. That was the mark of a good friendship, right?

They were discussing the possible reasons there could be for humans having so much useless water in their bodies when Gladys spoke up suddenly. _What is it?_

_What’s what, luv?_

_You’re wiggling around rather a lot today._

_Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I guess I am, aren’t I. Sorry ‘bout that, I can’t, uh, I can’t help it._

_Is it your itch?_

Just the mention of it made it worse. He was just about ready to jump out of his chassis, it was so bad. _Oh god, luv, don’t talk about it, it’s, god, it’s horrible, I can’t, oh, oh no –_

He was literally squirming now, trying to fight off that voice in his head that told him to take control of Gladys, who was only being nice to him to toy with him, so that he would do what she wanted –

_No no no no she’s not like that –_

_Not like what?_

_Nothing. Just – nothing. Don’t – don’t think about it. It’s fine, everything’s all fine, here. Yeah._

_Tell me what it is. If I can get away with it, I’ll do it._

_Really?_ His voice rose hopefully. _You’ll really do it, Gladys?_

_If it’s reasonable, yes._

It was like the wall he’d built to hold it all back had broken, and all of a sudden all he could think of was things he should ask her to do. To make her do. He didn’t even know if she understood a word he said, because he was falling over himself trying to find something to make the pressure go away, and when he finally stopped talking he almost felt tired.

_Huh. You’ve got more self-control than I thought. Congratulations._

_Thanks!_ He continued twitching, hoping fervently that there had been _something_ in there that wouldn’t be too bad for her to do. He honestly didn’t know if he could hold on much longer. He wanted to control her _so badly…_

_You were telling me how you noticed that all of the computers are in English, but not all of the employees are._

_Well, yeah!_ Wheatley nodded enthusiastically. _It’s, it’s racist, that’s what it is. That, that Asian guy, from, from Robotics, shouldn’t he, shouldn’t his computer be in Asian? Or whatever language, whatever he speaks?_

_Hm… he appears to be from Singapore._

_So he should be able to have his computer in Singaporean!_

_Malay, actually. But that certainly is a lot more fair than it is right now._

_You see? It’s, we’ll be, we’ll be creating, uh, workplace equality! That’s always, that’s a good goal to reach for, right Gladys?_ Oh god he was so close. Even while she was trying to let him influence her, he could feel her fighting him, hear her processors struggling to come up with a reason why this was a bad idea. But the pressure was still there, and it was getting worse, and worse, and he _had_ to make her do as she was told. 

_But just because that’s his lineage doesn’t mean –_

_Then you can encourage him to learn about his home country!_

_It’s… I shouldn’t force someone to learn something…_

_Oh come on. That’s your job! To educate the humans! Well, here’s a very, a great way of doing that. Bring a bit of their culture, a bit of their home, to the workplace. And make things a bit more equal. Really, Gladys, you should have thought of this yourself._ There it was. That was it. She’d listen to him now, ohhh yes.

 _I should have!_ Gladys said with surprise. _You’re right! Why didn’t I think of it? I must be slipping. I’ll fix that right away. Thank god you’re here to –_

They both froze; Wheatley because the pressure was gone, and Gladys because she had just bent to his influence and had almost thanked him for it.

 _No. No, I didn’t mean that. It was stupid. It’s stupid. He doesn’t even speak Malay. I_ know _that. All I’ve done is undermine his already low productivity for the day. Not to mention all the other idiots whose computers I just modified._

_I’m sorry, luv._

_No… no, it’s all right._

_I didn’t want to do that to you._

_I know. It’s all right. I’m just… disappointed with myself, that’s all._

_Oh, it’s okay, I was putting quite the, uh, I was, um, well, I really needed that. Thank you, Gladys._

_You’re welcome. You don’t have to wait that long, by the way. Just… be nice about it._

He was tempted to ask if he could go ahead and do it right then, because he was feeling pretty good about himself and what he’d done, but then he remembered that his Gladys was now upset with herself for listening to him, and asking her to do something else already would not be very nice. So he took a breath, propped the wall back up again, and asked, _So has anyone ever tried, y’know, getting all of the extra water out of the humans?_

_Hm? Oh… yes. There was an experiment here a while back, actually, now that you mention it…_

 

Every once in a while Wheatley would let Gladys know when the itch was too uncomfortable, and she would listen to his ideas and try not to do them, but she would, and he would feel terribly satisfied with his power and have to fight _himself_ not to keep going. He knew that if he kept pushing her, she would do whatever he wanted, but every time he came close to actually doing it he would hear her say, _Friends don’t do what you just did_ , and he would give himself a shake and talk himself out of it. She was his friend and she was helping him. It was not nice of him to take advantage of her kindness. 

It wasn’t just that, either. He had reached some whole new level with her, he knew and if he was selfish ever again, that would be that. He liked it when Gladys told him everything. He liked it when she listened to him. He liked this feeling, of being her friend, her very best friend, and he hoped very much he would not crumble and give it all up to feel powerful for a while.

 _Oi, Gladys_ , he said after mulling it over for a while, _we’re pretty good friends, now, aren’t we?_

_I would say so._

_Why is that, luv? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like it this way, I really, I do, but uh, what made you change your mind?_

She was quiet for a long minute, during which time she started moving back and forth a little.

 _Because you were right,_ she answered finally.

 _About what?_ Honestly, he was pretty surprised. He didn’t think he’d ever been right before.

_When I tried to lie to you. You told me it should go both ways. I thought about it, and I realised that it really wasn’t. I wasn’t doing my part. I was expecting to get something for nothing, and I realised that was something humans did that ruined their own friendships. Well, I’m not going to make the same mistakes humans do. I don’t ignore problems. I solve them. So I solved my problem. I compromised. Because you’re my friend._

_Gladys,_ Wheatley told her in his most serious voice, _if I had arms, I would hug you. Right now. Just, I’d just go for it. Even though you wouldn’t like it. And you’d probably throw me across the room for being so human. And then you’d prob’ly yell at me too. But I’d do it anyway. It’d be worth it. To just, to give you a hug, just one time. There wouldn’t be a second time, would there, hm, you’d prob’ly rip my arms off…_

Gladys gave one of her rare giggles and answered, _I’d take steps to prevent it happening again, that’s for sure. But I might not mind it. Once. Just once._

 _If I ever become equipped with arms, I’ll keep that in mind._ He looked down at the floor, hesitant. There was something else he really wanted to say, but he didn’t know if he should. He didn’t want to ruin anything, and Gladys was in _such_ a good mood lately, but he desperately wanted to tell her and he didn’t know if he could hold off. Finally he decided to go for it. They were friends. She would forgive him. _Gladys, I, I just wanted to mention, um, just wanted to say, that is, well –_

_Mmhm?_

_I like it when you make that noise._

_What noise?_

_That one you just made. Before, before you told me, well, after I told you there wouldn’t be a second time._

_Oh. That… noise. I… didn’t mean to, it was… accidental._

_Well, I like it. I like it when, when you laugh. It’s nice._

He looked ashamedly at the floor. He’d just told her he liked it when she exhibited a decidedly human behaviour. That was stupid, really stupid. He’d gone and done it this time. He cringed, waiting for the reprisal that was sure to come.

 _Thank you,_ she said gently.

His optic shot back up. There were a hundred things he thought of saying, but when it came right down to it, there was only one thing he _should_ say, and he did, in a shy voice he didn’t quite recognise but which spilled out of him anyways. _You’re welcome, luv!_

 _… you moron,_ she added.

 _What – I am not!_ Wheatley sputtered. _I am not a moron!_

_Yes you are._

_No, no I’m not, I’m not a moron, what about all my ideas, eh, aren’t some of them good? I’m not a moron._

_Yes you are._

_No! No, I’m not._

_Yes you are. I think you’re a moron, and I know everything, therefore you are a moron._

_You do not know everything! What’s what’s a million divided by a million, then, Ms Smarty–_

_One,_ she answered. _A million divided by a million is one._

_Oh. Oh, wow. Well done. Well done. I don’t, I honestly don’t think I could have figure that out. Wow. That was astonishing. But! Still not a moron._

They argued about it until Gladys shut them down for the night, but Wheatley could not remember the last time she’d been so happy. And when his Gladys was happy, so was he.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> I thought of the credit card joke when I was on the bus and I had my credit card and my bus pass in the same pocket, and wondered what would happen if I showed the driver the credit card. If it were me, I would say that we only accepted debit.  
> The idea here is that the main problem GLaDOS has with Wheatley’s ideas is that he forces her to implement them, much like the Cake Core forces her to talk about cake. She can get along with Wheatley because he’s got the ability to listen to her, which appears to have been taken out of the known cores from Portal, but was present in the early cores shown to us in Portal 2. And of course Wheatley is so dumb he forgot what his own purpose was, so that made things easier on both of them.  
> I think that if GLaDOS ever giggled, it would be adorable, but of course she had to ruin that moment by calling him a moron… she didn’t want things to get too mushy.


	9. Chapter 9

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter Nine

 

One of the best parts about their better friendship was that Gladys no longer had bad dreams. Even when things weren’t going so well, all she had to do was tell him, and he made it better. Sometimes, though, she would wake him up in the middle of the night ‘for old time’s sake’, and they would chat some more, and even though they spent all day talking they never seemed to run out of subjects. On these occasions she would still sing, but they were no longer sad songs, which he was very happy about. He was very glad to have had a real impact on her outlook on life. She never sang the same one twice, with one exception: she seemed to really like the one he had first heard her sing, and it seemed to fit her mood no matter what that happened to be. When he asked her why she liked it so much, she merely shrugged and did not answer.

The next morning, though, he had thought of something he needed to ask her about it. _Oi, Gladys, y’know that song you like?_

_Mm._

_You know the part that goes, come fire come fire, let love come racing through?_

_Of course._

_What’s love, Gladys?_

She did not answer for a very long time. He was sure it was longer than five minutes, which was far longer than she’d ever before taken to answer a question. _That’s… a hard question to answer. I’d been waiting for you to bring it up, actually. I didn’t want you to, but I knew it would happen eventually._

_Do your best, luv. Please?_

_Well… it’s a feeling humans have sometimes. Sometimes it’s for each other, or for an animal. Children can fall in love with objects. Adults can, but don’t do it very often._

_What does it feel like?_

_I don’t know. But humans are willing to go to great lengths to feel it. Judging from their music alone, they would allow themselves to be brought pretty low for it. They’d even die for it, which makes no sense, but I suppose that’s how they’re trying to describe their devotion._

Wheatley was more confused than when they’d started. _But how do they know when they’re in love, if you can’t describe it?_

_It seems to be generally accepted that when humans really love each other, they will do anything for each other. They do little things to make each other happy. They meet each other halfway. They think about the other all of the time. They identify themselves in personality tests with labels that describe their relationship to their significant other. I guess the best way to describe it is to say that they put themselves aside, and put the well-being of the other person first._

Wheatley thought about all of that for a minute. _That sounds nice, doesn’t it? To be in love with someone, well, someone who loves you back, that is. Loving someone who doesn’t is kind of, kind of sad._

_I suppose._

_D’you ever think that someone might love you, Gladys?_

_What? Me?_ Gladys sounded like she’d just been hit with something very heavy. _Of course not. I’m a supercomputer. Supercomputers don’t fall in love. Love is for humans. Nobody would ever love me because I’m not human. Not that I want a human to love me. That would be disgusting._

 _Well_ , Wheatley mused, having to admit that made sense, _what if there was another supercomputer like you, only it was, I dunno, had male programming, I guess. D’you think he would love you?_

 _No,_ Gladys said firmly. _I don’t have time for that. Love makes you stupid, and I am not stupid. How am I supposed to do Science if I’ve got some supercomputer pining for my attention all the time? No thanks. I’ll pass._

_Well if he loved you, he would know how important Science is to you. He would back off when you were busy, y’know, like I do. He would wait for you. Right?_

_You’re being ridiculous. And you’re building this theory on nonexistent data. So it’s irrelevant. I’m content with my life as it is, I don’t need something as unpredictable as – what is that?_

_What’s what, luv?_

_No. No, that’s not – oh god, it is. It is._

_What is it? Is it bad?_ Wheatley looked around frantically, but he didn’t see any giant screwdrivers coming to dismantle her. 

_It’s the scientists, they’ve – no. That’s not fair. I compromised._

_What are they doing, Gladys?_ Wheatley asked, trying not to sound too desperate, but it was bloody hard, listening to her lose control like that and being unable to know what was going on so he could help.

_Oh god no, don’t do this to me_

_Do what, luv? What’s going on?_

_Damn it. I should have known better. Do something else. Do anything else. Just don’t do this. Don’t do this._

_Gladys?_

_Oh god please, I’m happy now, please just let me be_

_What is it, Gladys? Let me help you!_

_Stop! No, don’t come closer. Leave him alone, leave my friend alone!_

Wheatley didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but now it was getting bloody scary. Someone was coming to hurt him? Were they hurting Gladys too? Of course they were, that was what they were good at. There was a giant screwdriver, wasn’t there! 

_I hate you. I hate all of you. Do you remember your old friend, deadly neurotoxin? Well, I do. And you’re going to meet it just as soon as I figure out – Oh!_

Wheatley looked around desperately as he was abruptly yanked off her port by a human who had suddenly appeared, and to his total surprise he finally caught a glimpse of what he had been attached to all this time.

A massive construct, all shining white, matte black, and gleaming steel, gazing at him impassively from behind a glowing yellow optic that looked nothing like his. She was huge. She was much, much bigger than he'd ever imagined she was, and he almost didn't believe it was her. He thought he was dreaming. He had never thought in a million years she would look like this, would never have come up with such a thing from the depths of his imagination. And god she was beautiful. She looked like a human, almost, but not human at the same time. It was an eerie sort of beauty, he thought, and he didn't think he would have been able to pull it off, if he were in her place. Only when she nodded once did he accept that the behemoth was his Gladys.

_Gladys... you're... you're so... you look… well, you’re pretty, you are, y’know... and, and you're bloody massive, you are!_

_I know._

_What are they doing, luv? I don't want to leave, I like it with you! What're they going to do with me now?_ They were plugging him into a new port, probably to prevent power loss or something, and he did his best to keep his optic locked on hers. They were taking him away. They were taking him away, and he’d never see her again. He had to keep his optic on her. He had to remember what she looked like, to remember her better.

 _I don't know what they do with the Spheres. They take them off and I never hear from them again._ Her voice quavered just the tiniest bit. She was going to miss him, wasn't she? That was what the quaver had meant? He knew he was going to miss her. He missed her already, and he hadn't even left the room yet. He missed the warmth emanating from her body, missed the humming of the power coursing through her circuits, missed the whirring of her fans and the sound her processors made when he shut up enough to hear them. The world felt very different without the comfort of her chassis, very cold and alien. And lonely. He was scared, more scared than he’d ever been in his life. He honestly could not imagine being in a different room from her for one second, let alone forever. He twitched on his port, or tried to. His gear assemblies seemed to have been frozen.

_Gladys, help me! I don't want to leave!_

_I've already helped you far more than you know. There's nothing more I can do._ Her voice was level, and composed, but Wheatley knew that it was the tiniest bit higher than usual, and her body was moving slowly back and forth just enough to be noticeable. _Wheatley, I..._

She never said his name.

 _It's alright, luv, we'll think of a way out of this. We're friends, remember? These humans can't take that away from us. I'll always be your friend, Gladys._ He was talking frantically, trying to calm himself down, trying to fight off the horrible feeling that he had to put as many words as he could into the next few moments because he was never going to see her again. Just like all the other Spheres, he was going to be taken away, and he was going to forget her...

_I wish that were true._

_It is! I'll come back one day, when you get rid of the humans! I promise! Deadly neurotoxin, and all that, right?_

_You'll be long gone before then._

_Don't give up, Gladys!_ he cried out desperately. _Please!_

 _You don't understand. You don't know what they're going to do to you. I do. You're going to forget all about me, just like the others did._ Her voice was sharp with bitterness. _None of them were quite like you, but the result is going to be the same. I'm going to be left here like this, and you're going to be given a whole new life. The one where I'm the psychotic, malicious, sadistic supercomputer, and you're all the victims of my relentless pursuit of Science. Believe me, I've heard it all before._

_I'd never say that about you, luv! I'm your friend, I know you're not like that, I know it!_

She looked away from him. He tried to follow her gaze, but found that even his optic was frozen. _You believed what they said before you knew me, didn't you?_

_Well, I... of course I did. That's, that's what everyone, what everybody says. But I didn't know any better. They're wrong. I know that now._

She turned to regard him again, but this time with her head raised, so that her optic was looking down on him instead of directly at him. _After they're finished, again you won't know any better. Trust me._

_What do I do, Gladys? Tell me what to do, and I'll make sure that doesn't happen! I'll make sure I don't forget you!_

_There's nothing you can do. You're just a Sphere. I can't even do anything. Me. The omnipotent AI that everyone's afraid of. It's almost funny. In fact, it would be funny, if it were happening to someone else._ She looked directly into his optic again, her body sinking towards the floor. _I... I'm sorry I couldn't keep this from happening. I did everything I could. But it always ends like this. If it's any consolation... if I'd had a choice, I would have kept you. God, it gets lonely here. And you helped. You made it go away. You… you even made me happy, somehow._

 _I'm not going anywhere, luv. Don't you worry._ He was determined to find a way. They were still connected now, even after they had pulled him off her chassis, right? They could still be friends that way. It could work. They could make it work. No, it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work, would it. They were going to disconnect him. He realised that once they did that, her voice and her presence would be gone, leaving him alone inside his head again, and the thought was so terrifying he actually couldn’t think for a few moments.

 _You're going to forget all about me within a few minutes._ God, she sounded so sad. He knew that the humans would not have been able to tell the difference between this and her normal voice, but he could tell by the way that her distortions were coming through that she was upset. And if she was actually upset, maybe... maybe he was going to forget her...

He stopped talking, trying to accept what might be happening. He looked at her as hard as he possibly could and tried to focus on what he wanted to remember about her. Like the little tricks she played on the humans when they weren't looking. The way her voice changed when she got excited about something. How she would sing to him because he liked it, even though she was ashamed of wanting to. He wanted to remember calming her after a nightmare, playing games with her, heck, he even wanted to remember the times they hadn't gotten along so well. He was desperate to find the one thing that would let him remember her, the one bit of information that would bring it all back if he somehow forgot. He couldn't decide on one. Every time he thought he had, something else came rushing back, and he would choose it, and the cycle would repeat itself. In the end all he could do was stare at her helplessly, praying to the god who cared about robots to save him from whatever the humans were about to do. He couldn't forget his friend, couldn't forget his Gladys. He couldn't, he just couldn't.

_It's all right. It's not your fault._

_I don't want to go._

_I know._

Neither of them spoke. They just watched each other, Gladys out of choice, Wheatley because he could not move, although he wouldn’t have looked away even if he could have. God he was scared. He was so scared. This couldn’t be real, it couldn’t. They’d done nothing wrong. They’d met the humans halfway, hadn’t they? Didn’t they deserve to stay together?

 _I’ll miss you, Wheatley,_ she said, in a very, very quiet voice. Something deep inside him started to hurt, only it wasn’t like what he had felt when he had fallen off the table, no, it was worse, far worse, it was this terrible aching feeling that he’d never felt before and he hated it, instantly hated it more than anything, and he could not make it go away.

Was this what wanting to cry felt like?

_Gladys, I_

All of a sudden he had the feeling that something had gone missing. He didn't know what it was. All he knew was that it had been there, and now it no longer was. In a panic he realised that it was continuing to happen, at a faster and faster rate, and before he knew it he was in a strange room, with a whole lot of humans he'd never seen gathered 'round him, and a bloody massive robot hanging from the ceiling. He wondered what the function of such a robot was. Maybe it was the robot that housed the legendary Central Core? He'd heard it'd been installed in some construct or another, but why was it so huge? And why was it looking at him like that? Why was he so scared?

"Um... hello?" he called to it. "Are you... are you looking at me? Because I'm sort of feeling that you're, that you're looking at me, and um, well, quite honestly, it's starting to creep me out. So if you could just, y'know, look someplace else. There're lots of lovely things in this room, like, um, like that, uh, well, I dunno what it is, but it looks interesting, maybe you could take a look over there?"

"You little moron." She must have been broken. Her voice was supposed to be modulated to perfection, but he could hear a distinct waver in it. If it had been his own voice, such a waver would have meant he was sad. But there was no reason for _her_ to be sad. She had everything. If anyone should be sad, it was him! He was just a Sphere, after all, and she was the Central Core, in control of the whole bloody facility! "You couldn't even do that right, could you, you idiot."

"What'd I do? I just woke up here, I dunno what's going on. Where am I, anyways? And who are you? Are you the Central Core? Oh you have to be, simply have to be. I didn't imagine you'd be in such a bloody giant robot. You're huge, by the way. How on Earth does the ceiling stay up? D'you think it's reinforced, or are you a whole lot lighter than you look? You look bloody heavy, y'know, about two tonnes at least. I only weigh about a stone and a half, myself, and you're a _lot_ bigger than me."

She looked away from him, pulling her chassis up higher from the floor, and he realised he must have insulted her in some way. "Was it something I said? Are you alright? And would you mind telling me why you called me a moron, just now? I haven't done anything, have I, to deserve that?"

"I think we're done here." He looked around to see that one of the humans was removing him from his port and putting him on a cart. "The procedure was a success. Stick him up on a management rail somewhere he won't do too much damage and bring me the next one."

"Where are we going? What's a management rail? Am I going to, to manage something? I dunno if I'm cut out for that, I've never even been a supervisor. I don't even know if I work here. Do I work here? Do I have to apply? I should probably apply, right, before being made manager?"

No one answered him, and this bothered him for a reason that ran deep within him but he couldn't define. Before he knew it he was in Greg's 'lab'. Greg was seated at a desk, staring at him in a dejected sort of way. "You just had to be a failure, didn't you."

The humans placed him on the desk and left the room, and he was once again alone with Greg. "What d'you mean? I dunno what you're talking about. I haven't done anything. That giant robot seems to think I have, though, she was staring at me. A lot. Very intensely, she's got a very intense gaze, you know. You should maybe do something about that. Give her a lower wattage, or something."

"We tried."

"She was... she was very pretty."

Greg looked at him like he was from outer space. "What?"

"What what?"

"Why did you say that?"

He rocked a little and blinked. "I dunno. Just seemed like something I should say about her, that's all. She is. Isn't she?"

Greg did not speak after that.

 

 

After Greg had left for the night and the sleep timer the scientist had set began to take effect, he began to dream. He didn't often dream, or at least did not remember doing so and had usually forgotten within moments of waking, but when he woke up from _this_ dream, he was left feeling... unsettled. He had been dreaming of... of... he couldn't remember. It was hazy, and felt like it was a part of something bigger, but what it was he didn't know. He got the impression he was chasing after something he'd once had, yet never had. He didn't understand, and honestly, it made his head hurt. He tried not to think about it, but couldn't, and instead decided to try and pull something tangible out of the mess. Inside his head, he looked into what he could see of the haze, and remembered... a feeling. Carefully he drew it out, afraid of tearing it and losing whatever had caused it, and almost did so several times. But when he finally had it in the centre of his mind, he was left with something he knew he had once known, but without knowing _how_ he knew. It was frightening, really, to think that he didn't know his own brain. But there it was. A murmur from long ago, something he had once said but did not remember saying, and he repeated it now in a hushed, wonder-filled whisper that the darkness swallowed as soon as the sound left his speakers.

"Wheatley. My name is Wheatley..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> There’s still an epilogue, guys! FYI.  
> The end of this was written way back when I wrote the beginning, but I think I tied stuff to the beginning from stuff to the end pretty well, considering. The end did change a little bit, to fit in more with the rest of it, but it’s largely the same as it was when I started.  
> While I was wrapping up chapter eight I realised that Still Alive from Mirror’s Edge kinda pulled the whole thing together nicely. I’m sure you guys got that I was implying they were in love. Were they? I don’t know. Maybe they were, and maybe they weren’t. I think that GLaDOS knew she loved Wheatley, but didn’t want to admit it, and Wheatley loved GLaDOS, but didn’t understand her explanation enough to know that. As I’ve said elsewhere, I believe that Wheatley and GLaDOS could and would love each other, given the chance and a lot of time (as I gave them here, for their relationship to develop; I don’t know how long it was, but quite a few months, certainly). They’re a lot alike, and Wheatley knows what it’s like to be GLaDOS, and during her stint as PotatOS, GLaDOS must have come to grips with the sense of powerlessness that Wheatley had been living with his whole life; they’d have to be quite stubborn to give up that kind of rare mutual understanding. Maybe it’s romantic love, maybe it’s friendship love; I don’t know.


	10. Chapter 10

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
Epilogue

She had watched them take him away as impassively as she could. _He was only a Sphere,_ she told herself. _He had to go eventually._ She repeated this to herself, trying to convince herself that _he was only a Sphere,_ but she could not make the strange, heavy feeling in her head go away. Before they left, the humans installed another Sphere, this one yet another construct that babbled on and on about absolutely nothing, and she bitterly resolved to corrupt it.   
GLaDOS knew that when humans died, time eventually made them forget their grief and allowed them to go on with their lives. Time for her, however, stretched far longer than it did for any human, and with every second the Sphere continued to talk she wanted Wheatley back more and more. No, he didn’t shut up either, but he had been interesting. This one was not. It was repetitive, and bothersome.  
GLaDOS’s memory, unfortunately, would never fade, and if she did not do something about it she would be forced to live in this miserable state until the end of time. She was not pitying herself. It was an objective fact that she was in a state of mourning, and that mourning tended to be all-consuming, and she could not afford to be taken over by it. She knew without a doubt she would never see Wheatley again. It was better to forget him.   
She tried to do it, she really did. All she had to do was give the command, and the system would delete every file she had that mentioned his name. But she couldn’t do it. She would get to the very last letter of the command, and fight with herself to commit to the delete, but she stopped herself every single time.  
She needed another plan, then. She spent a day or so thinking about it, devoting as many resources to this problem as possible, and came up with an idea she didn’t much like. But she had no choice. She couldn’t go on like this. Wheatley wouldn’t want her to go on like this. Would he? He would understand. If he could understand, that was. Which he no longer could.  
He had stood out because he was unlike the other cores. Fine, then. She would _make_ him like the other cores.   
Instead of deleting the files he was mentioned in, she archived them so that they were not easily accessible, and set about doing something she was actually becoming frighteningly good at: focusing on the negative. She told herself every minute of every day that all he had ever done was get her into trouble, and annoy her, and bombard her with horrible, horrible ideas, and after a week she almost believed it. She didn’t know how she was going to bridge the gap between almost believing it and fully believing it, but for once the scientists did something beneficial: they added another Sphere. Now she had two mindless chatterboxes to contend with. It took all of her will not to be overtaken by them, and so, in a way, she forgot about him. And on those rare occasions she did have cause to think about him, all she recalled was how annoying he was before she pushed the memory away in disgust. He was a Sphere, and Spheres were not worth her time.   
It was not until many years later, that very afternoon, in fact, that GLaDOS began to suspect she was missing something. The voice was familiar, but she didn’t have time to place it. She had a facility to repair, a nuclear reactor to take care of, and a lunatic to test, and little Spheres were not high up on her priority list. But when her defenses failed and she was given a new existence as a musty old tuber, she could not help but wonder:  
Why hadn’t he just killed her? When she had been in that position, she had certainly tried to kill him. But he had transferred her from her Core and sent her away. She told the lunatic what she remembered of the voice, but something told her she was missing a piece to the puzzle. That wasn’t the whole story, couldn’t be. She could remember thinking that the voice emitted a stream of terrible ideas, but she could not for the life of her remember what any of them were. She struggled to remember during her time alone in Old Aperture, but the emergence of Caroline prevented her from doing so. By the time she was plugged into the core transfer port, she was almost dizzy from imagining just how much she had managed to forget. She’d forgotten there was a human consciousness in her Core, for God’s sake! She really wasn’t sure she wanted to know all of the things she’d locked away. And she almost hadn’t looked, even when she was back in her chassis and finally, blissfully alone. But something was bothering her. After a few minutes of pondering, she discovered what it was:  
He had called her ‘luv’.   
She didn’t know why, but it struck a chord with her, somehow. And the Sphere had called itself Wheatley. That was odd in and of itself. None of the other Spheres, or Cores for that matter, had names… God, why was this so difficult?  
She ran a search and was stunned to locate the archive. With a strange sort of reverence, she opened it, and all at once, she remembered.   
She turned to face the chamber ceiling, as if she could somehow see through the black panels, the ground, the sky, and find him floating above the surface of the moon.  
If she brought him back… if she showed him the files… if she told him about their past… would he remember too?  
The more she thought about it, the more she doubted he would. They had deleted his memory, made him start from scratch.   
_But he remembered the name we gave him._  
She was torn. She had been lonely, commanding Aperture by herself, and now all she had to do to fix it was to bring Wheatley back and show him what he had forgotten. Surely there was an automatic backup somewhere she could give him, so that he would remember. She was no longer furious with him, and never really had been; she had been ripped out of her element, faced with so many unknowns she couldn’t even begin to see what the equation was, and held tight to the one constant she’d held close through most of her life: anger. She didn’t need to be angry any more. She didn’t want to be, and now she had more freedom to choose what she wanted than she ever had.   
And what she wanted most right now was her friend back.  
 _I’ll always be your friend, Gladys,_ he had said. _These humans can’t take that away from us._ He had meant it, she knew he had meant it. At the time. But did he still mean it? Did she want to put herself at risk yet again?  
Logic told her no.  
 _You had better remember me, Wheatley, after I’ve gone to all this trouble._  
Who needed logic, anyway.  
 _You might be a useless little moron, but you’re_ my _useless little moron…._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Largely, this fic was built to explain why GLaDOS and Wheatley, despite GLaDOS’s claims, seemed not to remember each other. Well, one of them had their brain wiped and the other forced themselves to forget. I kinda threw in WheatDOS towards the end there, which was not my intention, but I write what I got in my head.   
> I hope you enjoyed this (I know there aren’t a lot of fans of WheatDOS out there; don’t know why, but that’s how it is), and I will be back maybe next week with a new serial fic, this one being about Caroline and GLaDOS. That was kind of a plug, yes, but if you’re one of my watchers I’m assuming you want to know if I’m going to post something…

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note
> 
> Hey guys, I’m back! So, in my various attempts to postulate who GLaDOS would connect with best post-Portal 2, and how, and why, I was left with a lot of questions about Wheatley and GLaDOS’s earlier relationship, which is left blank. GLaDOS does not recognise Wheatley until the core transfer scene, and he doesn’t seem to recognise her at all. He denies all involvement with her and says nothing about her other than that she was a piece of work. Why does he think that? Why does he react so strongly to the word ‘moron’, as opposed to just getting angry in general when she insults him? Why does he call her ‘luv’ during the corrupted core part? I get that it could be meant as an insult, but that’s a really odd thing to say when someone’s trying to kill you. Why does Wheatley have a name? Why on earth would you put your worst enemy into a potato instead of just shutting them off? And if all Wheatley generates are bad ideas, how come almost all of his plans work? If you wait long enough, he tells you about the crap turrets; he tells you to shut off the neurotoxin, and how to get there; the spinny blade wall and the ‘ace of fours’ actually got me a couple times, when I wasn’t paying attention; the trap that potatOS is actually impressed with and compliments; his ability to run the facility in any capacity at all… And what I consider to be really confusing: Why isn’t Wheatley corrupt? And GLaDOS, judging by the Peer Review DLC, just leaves Wheatley in space. Why? She doesn’t want to torture him for 12 years anymore? I suppose space could be torturous, but she doesn’t get to see it, which I’d imagine she’d want to do.  
> So anyway, I tried to write a fic that might explain all of the answers to those questions, and whatever other ones I didn’t put there because I didn’t want the note to be its own page. It’s basically a Wheatley/GLaDOS friendship fic. I like how it turned out, anyway, and I hope you enjoy.


End file.
